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posted by martyb on Thursday January 02 2020, @01:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the fire dept.

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:


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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday January 02 2020, @05:13PM (3 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday January 02 2020, @05:13PM (#938684)

    If they're brown, and/or they talk funny instead of speaking English, the bigots who control the US government will try to not let them in.

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @05:43PM (2 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday January 02 2020, @05:43PM (#938701) Journal

    Or you talk funny

    That would eliminate most Australians, the majority of the UK, and a huge chunk of Americans.

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    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday January 02 2020, @08:04PM (1 child)

      by Thexalon (636) on Thursday January 02 2020, @08:04PM (#938780)

      I mean "talk funny" as in primarily speaking and understanding Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, Mandarin, or one of the other hundreds of languages that exist in the world. Because bigoted Americans believe that there's some sort of inherent superiority to English (a.k.a. bastardized Old Norse mixed with Old French and Latin and Welsh and a few other languages), maybe because Jesus spoke it in their version of the Bible.

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      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.