So, have any of you guys been affected by the fires and the flooding? I've been watching with dismay the escalation of events Down Under. I hope you're all OK.
Not here, we just got the heat no rain and no fire. Although Canberra went up in flames about 4 years back but no where near as bad as the current fires... Death count is up to 130, expected to double and over 750 homes have been raised. there are still fires and there is still the possibility of more destruction and death. They just fight and hope. Most of the people who died stayed to try and save their homes, which is allowed if you have a plan. no one predicted it would be as bad as it got. Most of the people who died were in their cars trying to get out or in their home with no where to go. its a bugger of a way to die. All I can say is that its very sad and scary. Bushfires is just something you get used to here. I've lived in relative ruralness most of my life and you still sit there going what would I do? From my knowledge of the Aussies on the board I'm pretty sure most of them are out of it. unless for some strange reason someones decided to go for a holiday in the middle of a fire zone...
I just heard they have a 100-strong team of police officers working on finding who started the fires, treating it as deliberate. I can't imagine how they will be able to live out their own lives with so much misery caused by them.
I have read that it's thought some of the people who started the fires went back to re-start them after they'd been put out! I really hope this is not true. If it is, I think the accusations of mass murder will be unquestionable.
They're probably a group of imbeciles, who think they'll only be told off for carrying out a 'childish prank'. Seems to be a typical reaction to today's judicial system; when you can get three years for murder and a 14 day driving ban if you hit someone when drunk driving. The little buggers need... well I'm sure everyone can fill in the rest of that sentence. <snarl>
Arsonists starting bushfires in Australia is nothing new... So the penalty for lighting a fire occassion death is a max of 25 years, the same as for 2nd degree murder. However, they could make the sentence consecutive, so 25years for everyone killed would be something like 5,000 years. I fonly people lived that long to be punished... I saw a doco on the big bushfire arsonists and its a pathology to do with attention seeking and destruction. Strangely enough :rolls eyes: the arsonists are often firefighters or in Australia members of the volunteer bush fire brigade. Lighting it allows them to be a hero by putting it out. Its sick but the big fires aren't 'imbeciles or pranksters', they're scary and trying to cause as much damage as possible. Be glad England is too wet to burn.
France isn't, unfortunately, especially the south east. And the same is true there, the forest fires are often started, and the arsonists are often firefighters. Makes you want to believe Hell exists quite litterally in textbook fashion so they could all burn endlessly for ever. Damn them all.
We may be damp up in the north but we can still burn. We often get problems around our local reservoirs. Campers start fires on the sandy bays that form but place them quite close to the edge of the encroaching moorland. Obviously its almost 100% peat to a depth of about 30 m. Often the edge of the peat catches alight and behaves much like a slow fuse. Drying the surrounding area out and igniting more peat. The unfortunate thing is this is all happening about 2m underground. A few years ago I went on a trip to do some fishing and the fire services had an area of about 1Km fenced off and had hoses running from the water's edge to pump it back into the soil to try and put out the fire. The frightening thing was that nothing at all was visible on the surface. Good job it was spotted in time. Most of the hill farms keep sheep. We could have had a world record kebab on our hands if it had gotten out of control.
Here is a news bulletin from the BBC. The Australian ploice have arrested one man for delberately starting a fire in Churchill, Victoria. Full news report here... Newsflash At least that's all we have in the UK.
Portugal has it's share of arsonists too. We also have loads of Eucalyptus trees, which burn nicely One of the reasons why so many arsonists are also Firefighters is because they have a thing for fire. Putting a fire out is nearly as much fun as seeing it burn.
The psychology of bushfore arson explained. If that wasn't enough in the North a land mass the size of South Australia, or about the majority of western Europe is under water. That would be some thing like Calais to Berlin, under up to 3 metres of water. The world is a crazy place... Oh and apparently all of this has proved that climate change is real. I'd hate to think i was merely imagining it.
I'm not sure if I read it in a paper or saw it online, but there was a theory proposed to explain the "Little Ice age". It happened just after the inadvertant( one hopes) biological warfare that occurred when Europeans first met the native Americans, and many many acres of farmland went back to rainforest absorbing a considerable amount of carbon dioxide. If that is true then we do have the chance to control whether Global warming happens, I hope we don't ignore the fact that we do have dominion over the Earth.
