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 Dropbear Victim wrote:
The fires have also effected Western and South Australia. There's 1.2million+ hectares burning in Western Australia and the Nullarbor is blocked off on the W.A side. Many people are stranded in truck stops along the Nullarbor as there's no other roads to get to and from Adelaide-Perth.

Yeah, rather glad I'm not still working in logistics... We had several clients regularly shipping stock by road to WA, and they would be screaming right about now.

Is it possible to bulldoze firebreaks and remove undergrowth.

Also does Oz have a dogmatic fire prevention policy? I know that the whole Smokey Bear thing in the US made matters worse because by preventing natural forest fires that occur about every decade or so thicker undergrowth built up so that the eventual fires burned that much hotter and longer and destroyed the trees rather than passed through them.

 Orlanth wrote:
Is it possible to bulldoze firebreaks and remove undergrowth.

Yes, and no. A part of the problem with preventative clearing is that a lot of the areas burning have protected species in them. So creating any sort of firebreak has to be done carefully to avoid accidentally wiping out some rare critter. And, as with preventative burning, it runs into the problem of the fires being extreme enough to jump over them. Can't really bulldoze 20km-wide firebreaks.

Also does Oz have a dogmatic fire prevention policy? I know that the whole Smokey Bear thing in the US made matters worse because by preventing natural forest fires that occur about every decade or so thicker undergrowth built up so that the eventual fires burned that much hotter and longer and destroyed the trees rather than passed through them.

Not sure what you mean by this. There's an acceptance that some amount of burning is always going to happen, but we do try to encourage people to minimise it. We have regional firebans during risk periods, but some people either ignore them or think that whatever they're lighting (usually outdoor barbeques) doesn't count. And a depressing number of fires are still started by idiots throwing cigarette butts out of car windows.

 insaniak wrote:

Also does Oz have a dogmatic fire prevention policy? I know that the whole Smokey Bear thing in the US made matters worse because by preventing natural forest fires that occur about every decade or so thicker undergrowth built up so that the eventual fires burned that much hotter and longer and destroyed the trees rather than passed through them.

Not sure what you mean by this. There's an acceptance that some amount of burning is always going to happen, but we do try to encourage people to minimise it. We have regional firebans during risk periods, but some people either ignore them or think that whatever they're lighting (usually outdoor barbeques) doesn't count. And a depressing number of fires are still started by idiots throwing cigarette butts out of car windows.

Ok, to explain its about asking why it isn't this bad every year. Australia has hot summers for as long as people remember. Its as futile to blame climate change deniers as it is to blame arsonists. However wildfires can get significantly worse if undergrowth is allowed to grow unchecked. And undergrowth grows unchecked when regular forest fires are put out or prevented and not allowed to race through and destroy undergrowth. A lot of mature trees in hot dry climates have evidence of repeated fire damage, it doesnt hurt the tree much, unless it is a sapling., natural undergrowth clearance by random fires is a natural occurance, and it reinvigorates the soil. If humans intervene it delays but sets up bigger fires over longer intervals, in a similar way that human intervention making levees for rivers delays flooding but make flooding much worse when it eventually happens.
Now my theory is based on case studies of forest fires in Oregon USA, so I do not know if it applies to Australia.

 Orlanth wrote:
Ok, to explain its about asking why it isn't this bad every year. Australia has hot summers for as long as people remember. .

It has - But last year was the hottest and driest year on record.

Hazard clearing isn't the problem. Again, we had as much hazard clearing last year as previous years, but it's getting harder to do because of the increasingly dry and hot conditions, and because of urban sprawl and a bunch of other factors (like the aforementioned endangered species being in the way).

It's also not a viable option in rainforest areas, which are normally too moist to burn, but are now catching due to it being so much hotter and drier than normal.

It is obviously due to climate change that the problem is so much worse, as it has lead to higher temperatures and less rainfall in Australia. So to that extent, the climate change deniers absolutely do bear some responsibility, but so do all of us who live lifestyles that result in high emissions, including myself and likely every person on this thread. That is what makes this issue so uncomfortable and why denialism is so tempting, because it is never nice to face up to the fact that the way we live may be harming others.

 Da Boss wrote:
It is obviously due to climate change that the problem is so much worse, as it has lead to higher temperatures and less rainfall in Australia. So to that extent, the climate change deniers absolutely do bear some responsibility, but so do all of us who live lifestyles that result in high emissions, including myself and likely every person on this thread. That is what makes this issue so uncomfortable and why denialism is so tempting, because it is never nice to face up to the fact that the way we live may be harming others.

Isn't Australia also having some kind of water crisis (hello Road Warrior!) resulting from too much water being used in farming and by corporate bottlers?

That's a water access issue for farmers in a particular area, rather than anything to do with the bushfires.

Yes, and in mining apparently I read. But that is not helped by a catastrophic drought.

So on the aspect of people looking to assign blame here, I think a lot forget that no one thing causes wildfires like this. This is a massive culmination of countless smaller things snowballing, just like American wildfires. Our issues with fire have literally been building to a head over a 100 years, and really since colonists first showed up and started kicking people off their land. And you want to go really far back, nature probably wouldn't have evolved to be as codependent on fire as it is WITHOUT humans, since this is a practice that's been done for thousands of years in some areas. I don't have a horse in the Australian political race, but I guarantee you no matter how stupid the ruling party are, the fault doesn't solely belong to them. They may have made it worse through poor management or stupid decisions, but a lot of this is through the mistakes and sins of multiple generations of not just Australians but people around the world, since fire agencies have been swapping lessons learned and policies for decades. The issues that leads to a situation like this cross political lines, social lines, and no group is free of blame here. Trying to blame these fires solely on the folks in charge currently is like blaming your current bus driver for his 30 year old bus not being maintained by the fleet for 30 years. It is forgetting that a lot of the factors that are causing this were probably set in motion before most of us were even born. And it's all sorts of crazy things that combine too. People think it's just the big ticket stuff like climate change but even something as benign as an invasive grass can have major impacts on fire ecology (aka the hellspawn that is cheatgrass)

I don't think anyone has a 100% answer for this. I just hope we can find a good enough one in time. Australia isn't alone in this situation, they're just the most visible right now in terms of severity. USA, Canada, and many other countries are in similar boats due to climate, poor management techniques, invasive species, urban sprawl (i.e. building subdivisions in wildfire prone areas, known as Wildland Urban Interface), resistance to logging and managed grazing, overlogging and uncontrolled grazing, uneducated pushback against prescribed fire, uneducated use of prescribed fire, drought, good ol fashioned arsonists, and plenty of others. If it sounded like I was contradictory here and there, good, you're starting to see just how incredibly complex this issue is. Not to mention the way fire grabs headlines leads to a ton of misconceptions about how wildfire actually works thanks to poor coverage from the media. The Amazon fires are a good example. That "lungs of the world" burning was mainly prescribed fire on grasslands surrounding the Amazon with little fingers creeping into areas already cut. Many of which were state parks or farmers clearing grasslands that are ecologically dependent on fire or cleaning up agricultural fields respectively. The funny part is that wasn't even a big fire year for the Amazon, it was just kind of an average one. But someone in the media had a slow news day I guess and next thing we know it's all over the media. Which is sad because here's Australia actually suffering catastrophic fire behavior and it's not quite getting the same level of attention.

When this happens it also leads to this idea of "fire = bad", and it's accidentally pushback of "fire=good". Fire merely is, sometimes good, sometimes bad, just like rain or wind. It ain't going away anytime soon so we may as well learn to live with it, and soon.

The problem with your bus analogy is that a report was issued in 2008 warning that in 2020 the problems would accumulate to the point where they would be noticeable, and the current government have had a decade to take action, and all they've done is cut funding because they're Australia's version of the ideological driven, ignore the experts, corporate stooge party.

Let's steer the discussion back away from politics, please. I realize it's wrapped up in discussion of the potential issues behind the fires, but we need to avoid turning this into a mud flinging match over political ideology.

So, what's an 'arsonist' and how does my car make them?

 Baragash wrote:
The problem with your bus analogy is that a report was issued in 2008 warning that in 2020 the problems would accumulate to the point where they would be noticeable, and the current government have had a decade to take action, and all they've done is cut funding because they're Australia's version of the ideological driven, ignore the experts, corporate stooge party.

The "current government" has been in power since May last year.

And we haven't had a stable government in this country since John Howard. Since then we've had one bloodless coup after another, ripping through 6 Prime Ministers in the space of a decade. It's a bit hard to get anything done when the people in charge can't even decide who's in charge for a full term.

Aussie political structure is fething clown shoes - both sides - which makes trying to blame all of this on the newest guy to sit in the PM's chair a bit pointless and craven.

Snipers to cull up to 10,000 camels in drought-stricken Australia

Camels were first introduced to Australia in the 1840s to aid in the exploration of the continent's vast interior, with up to 20,000 imported from India in the six decades that followed.

Australia is now thought to have the largest wild camel population in the world, with official estimates suggesting more than one million are roaming the country's inland deserts.

good grief.

I have a vague memory cropping up in discussion before on here, did not recall/realise it was quite that much of an issue.