[News] We can see this clearly from our house...

[moonvoice]

Fire threatens Swan Valley homes.






A few of the neighbours have come out to watch. It is oddly beautiful. There are, however, spot fires everywhere.

I hope everyone is safe.

Comments

[moonvoice.livejournal.com]

Is it a natural phenomenon that your bushland burns like this in summer, or is it anthropogenic?


Australia is the most bushfire prone continent in the world. That said, while a lot of bushfires start 'naturally' the reason we have so much 'ready to burn' bushland (seriously, many of our plants don't even germinate without a bushfire, and 'smoking' is something some native botanists must be prepared to do to grow natives) is because of about 20,000 years of firestick farming by Indigenous Aborigines to increase the amount of bushland over dense rainforest, and increase the availability of food sources like kangaroos.

So in a way, it's all anthropogenic. ;)

As a result, eucalypts are filled with highly flammable oil, and drop flammable 'firestarters' into the bushland (which is why we often have controlled burns in cooler weather closer to the suburbs - to eliminate that understorey), banksias just go 'whatever, BRING IT ON', and everyone who has a healthy grasstree has had to burn the dead growth off it and set it on fire. Some species are actually so fire dependent, that they cannot reproduce without fire, or a lot of smoke.

A lot of South-West Western Australia is this kind of sclerophyll scrubland, and it just loves to burn. Whether by arson, or just naturally.

Still going this morning, but the wind isn't moving it in our direction (and it'd have to get through another suburb first), which just doesn't happen in Perth (fingers crossed).

Total fire ban today, which means no welding, no moving heavy machinery over fields (i.e. no farming), or cars that could set off sparks, no cooking outdoors, no bushfires and so on.

[silverjackal.livejournal.com]

I assumed that there was a certain native burn requirement, but that anthropogenic effects also influenced matters. When we get raging forest fires here it's thanks to 200 years of fire suppression resulting from European colonization. The assumption was always fire = bad as opposed to fire regime = natural. Consequently a lot of forest is out of phase, and enormous amounts of tinder have built up. Of course logging companies also use this as an excuse to log, ignoring the fact that the natural burn regime bears little resemblance to the effects of logging. :P

People will also *insist* on building where they shouldn't, and not taking proper fire precautions -- because they're ugly, frankly, you have to keep all growth a fair distance from the house. It's not so bad in suburban developments where there are ample fire trucks and the safety crew can reach, but it's a real issue in more remote locations, where the fire can swallow homes and nothing and no one can stop it.