Posted: Jan 04, 2020 6:47 pm
As a volunteer firefighter, fuck that.
This season has been brutal and stressful for those, unlike you, who've had the fires at their doorsteps. Where I live, we've been under imminent threat since the second week of September. The oldest, grizzliest, staunchest National Party voting farmers up our way were laughing at the despised Greens calling this unprecendented in October, and are admitting they were wrong to do so now. Guys with 50 years of bushcraft who are gobsmacked that the fires aren't behaving like they've always done before, and who are mad at Morrison for his uselessness (and the Greens, too, because they can't help themselves).
It's not just that there are fires, it's that they're everywhere at once. In New South Wales, the old record for simultaneous fires at Emergency warning level was 4. We hit 6 in September, 17 in October, and this week we're back to 11, with another 8 at the level just below, which still includes out of control fires threatening to life and property. The numbers of threatening fires were a bit lower in November, but not due to a lull in fire activity, but instead because multiple fires north of Sydney merged into one singe, massive fireground with a perimeter of over 200km.
Unlike many previous broadscale fires, which achieved large total areas burned by being allowed to burn through remote, relatively uninhabited grasslands, these fires are incinerating the lush coastal fringe where millions of people live, and where fires of this scale in any one place are rare, and at the scale being experienced, previously undocumented.
Anyone who is under any doubt of what the scale is like, check out our NSW fire service's map of current incidents. The coastal strip contains 90% of the 8 million population of the state (and around 25% of the national population). If there's an area that's not on fire, chances are that's because it burnt in October and has been removed from the list of current incidents. And that's just NSW. Go north into Southeast Queensland, and much of that burned earlier in the season. Go south into Gippsland in Victoria, and at the moment it's as bad or worse, with the Navy sent to evacuate 4000 people from Mallacoota, a remote coastal town surrounded by National Parks and Biodiversity Reserves that are entirely burnt and burning, leaving no route out from a medium sized town that largely doesn't exist any more in any real sense.
I get that it's easy to dismiss this stuff when it's happening elsewhere: the Black Saturday fires in Victoria, or the Canberra or Eyre Peninsula fires of the last few decades had little impact in northern NSW beyond a few bad news cycles. But this has been completely off the charts from those incidents. The Black Saturday fires, horrific as they were, lasted 5 weeks, and were considered Australia's worst ever fires. We're into week 17 of this shit now, and - not to belabour the point - the fires are not petering out in week 17, but in fact back to close to their worst, with the largest evacuation zone in force for any natural disaster in Australian history.
Sorry, but... fuck your minimising shit.
This season has been brutal and stressful for those, unlike you, who've had the fires at their doorsteps. Where I live, we've been under imminent threat since the second week of September. The oldest, grizzliest, staunchest National Party voting farmers up our way were laughing at the despised Greens calling this unprecendented in October, and are admitting they were wrong to do so now. Guys with 50 years of bushcraft who are gobsmacked that the fires aren't behaving like they've always done before, and who are mad at Morrison for his uselessness (and the Greens, too, because they can't help themselves).
It's not just that there are fires, it's that they're everywhere at once. In New South Wales, the old record for simultaneous fires at Emergency warning level was 4. We hit 6 in September, 17 in October, and this week we're back to 11, with another 8 at the level just below, which still includes out of control fires threatening to life and property. The numbers of threatening fires were a bit lower in November, but not due to a lull in fire activity, but instead because multiple fires north of Sydney merged into one singe, massive fireground with a perimeter of over 200km.
Unlike many previous broadscale fires, which achieved large total areas burned by being allowed to burn through remote, relatively uninhabited grasslands, these fires are incinerating the lush coastal fringe where millions of people live, and where fires of this scale in any one place are rare, and at the scale being experienced, previously undocumented.
Anyone who is under any doubt of what the scale is like, check out our NSW fire service's map of current incidents. The coastal strip contains 90% of the 8 million population of the state (and around 25% of the national population). If there's an area that's not on fire, chances are that's because it burnt in October and has been removed from the list of current incidents. And that's just NSW. Go north into Southeast Queensland, and much of that burned earlier in the season. Go south into Gippsland in Victoria, and at the moment it's as bad or worse, with the Navy sent to evacuate 4000 people from Mallacoota, a remote coastal town surrounded by National Parks and Biodiversity Reserves that are entirely burnt and burning, leaving no route out from a medium sized town that largely doesn't exist any more in any real sense.
I get that it's easy to dismiss this stuff when it's happening elsewhere: the Black Saturday fires in Victoria, or the Canberra or Eyre Peninsula fires of the last few decades had little impact in northern NSW beyond a few bad news cycles. But this has been completely off the charts from those incidents. The Black Saturday fires, horrific as they were, lasted 5 weeks, and were considered Australia's worst ever fires. We're into week 17 of this shit now, and - not to belabour the point - the fires are not petering out in week 17, but in fact back to close to their worst, with the largest evacuation zone in force for any natural disaster in Australian history.
Sorry, but... fuck your minimising shit.