Some thoughts on bushfires and Emergency Services

By way of background, I rate myself as fairly risk tolerant with respect to bushfires.  I certainly loathe, with a passion:
  • the anal-retentive panic-merchants who seem to populate the Bush fire mob in Canberra, and 
  • the politicians who use bush fires to keep the population terrified and thus under control.
It is interesting that the enquiry into the bushfires in Victoria earlier in 2009 have brought out a lot of issues about incompetence for the State Fire people.  I had thought that this was stuff being dug out by folk who wouldn't appreciate that things get done in an emergency in less than ideal ways.  However, I have been paying a bit of attention to fire warnings in our area (mainly because the weather is hot, dry and windy, and the area is covered with a lot of dry grass - as a result of good rain in September and October and very little in November).  I now wonder if an IQ above 90 disqualifies people from serving in bushfire administration.

My key resource is a map put out by NSW Emergency Services purporting to show where there are fire bans and the levels of risk in the declared areas.

In the previous period of disgusting weather there were no symbols to indicate a fie ban on the map.  I thought this was simply a nerd glitch (I LOVE tautology) but did report it to the Minister for Emergency Services (who it so happens is our local State MP.

Today (!7 December) in the early afternoon it is about 36 degrees C, the wind is howling up to 78kph, and the humidity isabout 10%!  Lovely.  So I went to check that everywhere around here is fire-banned.  Here is the map.


Note the area to the South West of the State.  Coloured dark red for "Severe Fire Danger" but no fire ban!!!  I checked the text and it wasn't simply a matter of forgetting to include the symbol: they do not have a ban there (they do however have a very active thunderstomr system heading their way!  This is insane, especially as the area to the North (about the size of France) is under the highest rating of Catastrohic!

I thought to send the guys in the RFS an email pointing this out to them but there is no email address on their website.  Knowing what would happen if I tried to ring them - various switchboards and call centrres would suck money from me - I sent another message to the Minister.

Some peolpe do not learn.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Satin Bowerbird gets ready for Lanigans Ball.

Image
Having some time to spare today I went to check the bower near "Tom Green's Seat" in the Australian National Botanic Gardens.  The bower was well occupied by what I take to be - based on the green plumage and yellow bill - a 5th or 6th year male Satin Bowerbird.  (With all these images, click on them for a bigger - unfortunately not better focused picture.  The shots were taken hand held on full zoom from about 10m distance into a fairly well shaded location.) He was very much engaged in adding to the construction. Then it seemed that another bird called from the bush above.  This led to a whole lot of activity: the most spectacular (and worst imaged) was a flash of the wings: The bird also did a fair bit of hopping around.  Given that it was still immature I called to mind the greatest traditional Irish song of all time: Diarmuid O'Leary and the Bards performing Lanigan's Ball .  This ditty refers to spending "6 long months at Brooks Academy learning
Read more