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The pictures and stories coming out of Australia are awful, I cannot imagine anything worse that being burnt alive. This must have been terrifying for families.
My nephew lives outside of Sydney and my niece in Hamilton.
I took a look at these area's that are now gone and they looked so beautiful. I wonder how much time they had before the fire was upon them.
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As I read it the fires are in Victoria in-land so they are a long way off them Avril. They are blaming it on global warming and arsenists. It's a tragedy all round, parts of Australia are so beautiful.
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I also read that part of the problem was they wanted to clear tree's and brush away from certain area's but the 'green' brigade fought against it. Perhaps they will re-think this.
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I couldn't believe they hadn't created firebreaks to stop potential fires spreading like this. I don't think they'll need to rethink, the fire's done it for them.
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The plight of the people who died is too horrific to contemplate. It is shocking in the extreme that some of these fires were started deliberately. Let's hope for heavy rain as so much of the bush is dry as a tinderbox following the prolonged drought.
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In fire-prone areas of the south-west US, there has been a program for several years to get homeowners to remove "fuel" from a specific distance aroud their homes, so that the danger of having flammable vegetation right next to an all-wood house is minimised. Seems a bit fundamental to me. Of course, you still can't avoid embers carried by very strong winds, but at least ground-cover fires wont get your home. I guess a lot of the Australia fires were so violent that burning embers were being carried over a hundred miles because the winds were so strong. You can't really guard against that kind of thing.
A lot of people in our area remove any trees from their property whose height exceeds the distance between the tree and their house. If it blows down, it won't hit the house!
A workmate of a friend of ours, who didn't realise what falling trees can do, had seven 100' fir trees hit his house a couple of years ago. They just about destroyed the house. They were on the edge of his property and some of them belonged to a neighbor, but they were taller than the distance between the tree-line and the house - QED.
Unlike a fire or flood, at least your possessions don't get destroyed in that scenario.
There's a lot of public debate in Anacortes about clear-cutting new development areas, but I personally wouldn't buy a house with big trees close by, no matter how much they add to the "ambience". People wanting "ambience" can pay my insurance!
Frank
Frank Damp (wife Eileen, nee Nixon)
Leyland resident 1941-1965, emigrated to the US in 1968,
retired to Anacortes, Washington State, USA in 1999.
