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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: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 02 2020, @06:32PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 02 2020, @06:32PM (#938733)

    What makes this time more special than the rest?

    Welp, I lived the last 50 years in Florida, and here we've gone from vast thriving wild spaces and a few cities with scattered spots of ecological tragedy to a broad landscape of ecological tragedy, built-out development to the limits of available resources - and beyond, with scattered spots of wild spaces barely hanging on, across the ENTIRE peninsula from Cedar Key-Jacksonville down to Naples-Miami.

    The population growth in Florida over those 50 years roughly mimics the population growth of the world as a whole, though Florida started out a bit more resource constrained, the whole world is heading in the same direction, and unlike Florida, the world doesn't have outside resources to tap, or a place for people who are sick of the crowds and bullshit to emigrate to.

    You can keep shoveling shit in a 5lb bag long after 6lbs are in there, but at some point it truly does get messy.

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