Last week’s trash journalism from Miranda Devine suggested “greenies” should be strung up from the lamp posts given they’re the real cause of the Victorian bushfires.
This morning on the Weather Zone forums, an anonymous poster, associated “horsey people” and drivers of expensive cars with the tragedies.
I have driven almost all these spots with my work and they are deathtraps waiting to happen. It beggars belief that they were allowed to be built. And still the development goes on. Sheoak road is ridiculous, for the houses and for the speed humps and diversion roundabouts that make using the road above 15km/h almost impossible.
Idiot city yuppie tree changers with their mercedes and BMW 4WD’s with no connection, common sense or vision to the land around them other than the “pretty” view and lovely trees. They secure the ultimate destruction of the landscape they so desire.
I also know first hand that the CFS here will not enter properties that are deathtraps. Happened more than once in the recent Mt Bold fires. My mate on their truck recalled an owner begging them to save his house. It was surrounded by metre high phalaris. They refused to enter. Ultimately saved their lives.
I’ll say nothing of the stupid horsey people who tried to hold up a truck trying to battle the fire while they attempted to run their animals up the road.
There are dozens of other examples of culture war baggage being stapled to the terrible events of 7 February.
Like every other widely discussed topic of these times, it doesn’t take long for an incredible range of irrelevant or unrelated war cries from the cultural warriors to get joined to a terrible fire disaster than killed hundreds of people.
Tree huggers, “greenies”, climate change deniers, climate change zealots, BMW drivers, horse owners, and the viciously intolerant like Danny Nalliah — who claimed it was God’s punishment of Victoria for supporting abortion — or Miranda Devine’s advocacy of blaming and hanging “greenies”, are all fuelling a conflagration of indignation, entitlement, prejudice and hate.
Some of the stories, about people being fined for tree clearing that protected their homes (only 257 trees) flirt with agendas supporting the clear felling of more land for farming.
Others, like this morning’s opportunistic call by the National Association of Forest Industries for an urgent bushfire summit lead-off with the big lie that “the current process of locking forests up in conservation reserves and national parks with no on-going fire management regime has proven to be fatally wrong.”
This is straight from the playbook of former Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels, in the packaging of a deeply flawed summary of an issue into a few words that resonate with popular prejudice, and then promoting solutions that will benefit the sectional interests of its backers under the guise of desirable public policy initiatives.
The naked greed in this is to carve more roads into wilderness areas and convert national park resources into immediate profits.
Let’s not forget that significant parts of the fire zones on 7 February had been burned three years ago, or that grass fires can be as lethal as forest fires.
Hundreds of people died on that day because they had nowhere to go when the fires came. Not because they were “greenies” or drove expensive cars, or dared to live in our beautiful countryside.
If there had been simple fire rooms in the properties that burned, as shown in the home video by Jim Baruta at St Andrews, there would have been widespread destruction of property but not of people, and far fewer deaths in cars while trying to flee when it was no longer safe to do so. (Baruta was interviewed on the 7.30 Report and this download includes his video and an interview in which he shows the bunker and describes his experience.)
Last Saturday would have been an insurance disaster, but not a human catastrophe.
Surely there is some reason amid all the unreason to hope that the Royal Commissioners will do their own culture wars hazard reduction, so that the many things they must consider are not cluttered up by envy, prejudice, social hatreds and vested interests.
In NSW the same game plan for the rednecks (advisedly) was exposed big time. Of 830 fires a mere 67 were in national parks, mostly burning into not out of. Only 3 in declared wilderness areas – no threat to life or property being so remote. This was the director of NPWS in a letter to The Australian for all to read.
NAFI are losing the momentum on this one, and their cover is blown. For 5 decades they logged rainforest and wet old growth forest types – no doubt all around Kinglake West, Marysville, Kilmore etc. They got their way in the main. Now look at the pictures in The Australian of blacked trees to the horizon back to Melbourne. They don’t show fuel load – what they show are state forest logging zones on the mountain above Kinglake that were skinny dry sclerophyll regrowth. The kind that burns the way wet old growth and rainforest doesn’t burn.
Let’s get the harvesting plans out for the last 50 years. The timber volumes chipped per logging coup to indicate tree size, and species. Let’s see what areas burned today as dry sclerophyl that used to be wet old growth and rainforest decades ago before the 8M tonnes a year woodchip sector mined the trees for chips and converted it all to dry sclerophyl. Before climate extremes turbo charged the regrowth wick and negligence or criminality lit it all up.
There will be some areas that were always dry sclerophyl but in a mosaic. Now its monoculture dry forest type. Thankyou rednecks. No wonder they don’t want to talk land tenures or statistics of firestorm origins. It was the same in NSW in 1994. Damning stats of their own land use failures in state forest and less extent private farm land, and greed. Damn their impudence. They systemically killed off our wet forests over 5 decades and want to blame the greenies for that? Get real.
The Herald Sun won’t let any comments on the Rob Incoll opinion piece go forward promoting the hazard reduction/fuel load claim. I made my comment at about 4am this morning and kept a copy knowing the way the world works, onto my blog. Along the lines of the above about a career long blindness about conversion of wet forest types to dry sclerophyl and leaving moisture out of the oxygen, fuel, ignition bushfire equation. So convenient, so cynical.
The Herald Sun moderators have pulled it off comment from the public by the look of things here:
Need action to prevent similar disasters
Rob Incoll
February 16, 2009 12:00am
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25058241-5000117,00.html
God I hope 4 Corners tonight give the loggers what they deserve after their fun at the expense of green people many of them fatal victims of their logging legacy in central Victoria.
How long until the power company being sued joins the state forest agency as a co-defendant, or even some of these dog woodchippers? Their actions of destroying wet forest were “reasonably foreseeable” for expert foresters to quote Donoghue v Stevenson. Turning wet forest into dry across whole landscapes was always going to lead to bushfire/wildfire/megafire.
While bunkers are being much discussed (has it really taken us 200 years to figure this out?) the paradox of the remarkable Jim Baruta experience is that it is evident that the bunker was actually NOT critical in his survival. As his video clearly showed, his house survived barely touched by the fire–and more remarkable, his garage—sharing walls with the bunker—also survived despite being apparently loaded up with plenty of highly flammable things. The point is that Jim Baruta shows that the “leave early or prepare and stay” policy remains perfectly valid. The emphasis is on “prepared” and it is equally clear that in the great Australian complacency, hardly anyone was prepared—even though all day Saturday the warning signs were clear to everyone. In the widely covered Hughes experience, they had woeful preparation (apparently a roof ventilator allowed free access of embers into the ceiling space!) but nevertheless survived because the house gave sufficient protection for just long enough (before being burnt from the inside out) that they could find already-burnt clear ground to shelter; this was an example of surviving by not panicking. The endless pictures of completely burnt-out houses does not prove that either they cannot be saved by simple measures nor that even with little proper preparation they cannot provide some protection that is a lot better than being outside or worse, in a car.
Jim should be sent on a lecture circuit to show his fellow bush-dwellers what simple and relatively inexpensive measures can save a house (and thereby save themselves). It would be worth much more than the official bureaucratese that is likely to come out of any government enquiry in which the health-and-safety brigade will most likely propose the usual over-the-top and unaffordable, impractical measures.
That Baruta story revealed from memory the house was double not single brick or other material. More expensive for that reason too. This was the gist of extensive comment elsewhere. Interesting to read Les Murray the poet about bunkers in the Sunday press. I go along with that too. Critical to be away from the dwelling says author Paul Collins. My buddy who survived the 94 fires Mellong on the Singleton Rd (they were told by police to evacuate, instead did a back burn up to their farm houses, sheds) suggests alternative independent air hole perhaps via an extended inlet pipe system to 100 metres away. Has a logic to it with fire passing over.
Does anyone really think the Greenies are to blame? People who recognize a path to power may be achieved by jumping aboard the Green movement are far more guilty. As for the redneck brigade one has to understand they make an awful lot of noise but frankly they are none too bright.
Who allowed the shonky building standards to take over the building industry? Deliberately shaving off any impediment to survival in order to sell cheap sub-standard buildings? Who allowed people to build houses smack up against national forests? Who allowed town planners to construct cul-de-sacs in high fire danger areas? Who allowed the sheer numbers of people to move into these fragile areas? Streets which once had two or three houses now having forty houses: whilst failing to maintain any infrastructure? Who allowed people to build in these areas without building fire shelters? Who thinks it’s more important to tender for the next available Olympics, or to spend 500 million dollars to up-grade the Rod Laver arena? Who has allowed the construction of a power-hungry desalination plant, to be fueled by brown-coal? Who has quickly called for a royal commission, in order to deflect the guilt of allowing all of these things to happen? Who allows the barbarism of the Formula one car racing event to happen on a yearly basis?
Once you’ve worked these questions through, you might ask yourselves if it would have been better under a government led by the state Coalition? Personally, I don’t think so. Instead of the present government just accepting payments from the developers, the Coalition would probably have tendered for the tender, as it were. Throughout our history our various states’ governments have been reveling in sh-t. Occasionally nature bites back. And people are fried alive. And we all know governments are seldom held to account for anything.