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Bushfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia. They're Only Going to Get Worse:
Australia has deployed military planes and ships to provide aid as hundreds of wildfires rage across Australia, forcing residents to flee and destroying homes.
The Australian Defense Force is sending ships to the Victoria town of Mallacoota on a two-week supply mission and using helicopters to bring in more firefighters since roads were inaccessible, according to the Associated Press (AP).
On Tuesday, thousands of people from the town on Australia's southeastern coast fled towards the water as a fire ripped through the area.
Photos of residents taking shelter on boats circulated on social media.
[...] In New South Wales, where Sydney is located, firefighters are battling more than 100 fires, according to the state's Rural Fire Service.
Sydney's famed New Years Eve fireworks went ahead despite the fires. A petition calling on the government to cancel the display and give the funds to firefighters and farmers instead got more than 280,000 signatures.
[...] New South Wales' Rural Fire Services Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said this wildfire season is the worst on record.
"We've seen extraordinary fire behavior," he said Tuesday, according to the AP. "What we really need is meaningful rain, and we haven't got anything in the forecast at the moment that says we're going to get drought-breaking or fire-quenching rainfall."
More than 900 homes have been destroyed in the state, according to New South Wales Rural Fire Service.
A fire tracker map maintained by researchers in Western Australia shows that they are also threatening areas around every major city in the country.
Additional coverage:
- Australia fires live: two dead in Cobargo as NSW and Victoria face bushfires threat – latest updates - interactive map too
- 9news live feed
- Large parts of the NSW South Coast are expected to lose all telecommunications in coming hours
- Tens of thousands of lightning strikes spark dozens of fires across South Australia
- More than 30,000 tourists in Australia who defied orders to leave area east of Melbourne amid raging bushfires are 'TRAPPED' as roads are cut off, after locals warned staying would be 'suicide' - have the pinch of salt ready
- 4000+ blocked on Mallacoota beach as forest fire approaches
- The Navy joins fleet of military helicopters called in to help evacuate south-eastern Victoria
- A total of 33 fires are still burning across Victoria as of 7pm Tuesday, with the majority of those blazes in East Gippsland.
(Score: 2) by OrugTor on Thursday January 02 2020, @04:41PM (8 children)
There are various political factors (please don't demand citations) in the US that block wildfire prevention policies like prescribed burns, cleared buffer zones around habitations. Can you give us your take on why Australian wildfires are so out of control and destructive?
(Score: 5, Informative) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @04:50PM (2 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 02 2020, @10:34PM (1 child)
According to the Bureau of Meteorology (@BOM_au), 2019 was both the hottest and driest year ever measured in Australia. [twitter.com]
(Score: 1) by evilcam on Monday January 06 2020, @07:20AM
To further add to this, according to Australia's peak scientific body, the CSIRO (and the BoM) in this 2007 study [csiro.au] (cited an amazing 247 times according to Google Scholar) climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of bushfires in Australia (and presumably the world).
To quote former NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner, Greg Mullins [smh.com.au]:
It's a long bow to draw and say that had there been policy decisions over the last 7 years of LNP governments tackling climate change that these fires wouldn't be happening. But the science indicates they wouldn't be nearly as bad if everyone would stop digging up coal and subsidising the shit out of fossil fuels.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @08:44PM (3 children)
Australia has evolved to thrive through bushfires. Bushfires are an essential part of the Australian ecosystem. The problem is that people insist on building homes in bushfire areas and are politically forbidden to manage the bush fire fuel that surrounds the houses. The political reason for this is that burning the fuel releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
(Score: 5, Informative) by MostCynical on Thursday January 02 2020, @10:43PM (2 children)
Er, no.
some parts that are burning haven't burnt in thousands of years.
And the hazard reduction activities don't prevent fires, and aren't being stopped by politics [theguardian.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @04:54AM (1 child)
You do realise that thousands of years is still a small time in the time scale of how Australia works. The fact of the matter is that Australia is naturally a bushfire zone. The fact that some areas haven't seen an active volcano eruption in thousands of years doesn't change the fact that the area is an area of volcano activity. This is the case for Australia and bushes that haven't seen fires for thousands of years. We will see those bushlands recover as normally as eucalyptus forests normally recover.
(Score: 3, Informative) by MostCynical on Friday January 03 2020, @05:43AM
I work with people who have done PhDs and post doctoral research on the rainforests and other rare flora, fungi etc.
They think that, while *something* will grow back, it will not be the same ecosystem, and some rainforest species will not recover.
We won't know what does an doesn't recover, in some cases, because we don't know else [wikipedia.org] might be in there now.
Some of it just isn't meant to burn [theguardian.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Informative) by EventH0rizon on Thursday January 02 2020, @08:55PM
This explains it pretty well.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/01/australia/australia-fires-explainer-intl-hnk-scli/index.html [cnn.com]
The so-called fuel loads in the mostly Eucalyptus forests in the South East part of the country after years of drought are through the roof. Add to that the fact that we're getting more high energy, high temperature weather events and you have countryside where the physics acts more like a pizza oven than a forest.
The size of the fires here is hard to comprehend.