By Viv Forbes
(Background: Australian Government promises A$11M for more flashy water bombers.)
In a furious firestorm with high winds, extreme temperature and big loads of dry fuel, water bombing is usually just wasting water and avgas. In hot winds, water will evaporate quickly, embers will start glowing and blowing, and soon the fire will be raging again.
And with few dams getting built, and much stored water released to irrigate the oceans, where will they get the water? Too often they will steal it from private dams, leaving even prudent landowners with inadequate water in a drought.
Water can extinguish house fires, and protect homes and towns, but is useless for raging forest fires. The only solution here is to fight fire with fire – back burning from the wide cleared tracks which should protect every park, forest and property.
The best fire insurance is to keep tracks and firebreaks clear and conduct regular cool-season burn-offs, especially in National Parks. And stop creating fire hazards by locking up more land.
Don’t blow money on more water bombers – we need more back-burning, more boots and tyres on the ground and more graded tracks.
And all fire fighters need water, so we should build more dams and weirs.
Some Reading:
Water could not quench “The Fire with Nine Lives”:
https://saltbushclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/the-fire-with-nine-lives.pdf
This article was published earlier on:
https://principia-australia.org/more-water-bombers-no-fight-fire-with-fire/
Shakespeare told us:
A little fire is quickly trodden out; Which, being suffered [tolerated], rivers cannot quench.
King Henry VI, Part III (4.8.6-7)
National Parks and native vegetation clearing laws are not bad ideas per se. However, they have become sacrosanct in the modern green religion to the point where they are no longer seen as merely tools that may be applied towards conservation outcomes. They are, themselves, the outcomes to which all else must be subservient. Conservation hardly comes into it. Neither does public safety, whether by limiting the spread of catastrophic bushfires or by lopping dangerous overhanging limbs and trees along roads.
This should not really surprise. Ours is a religious species after all. Rather than attracting the taxonomic epithet ‘sapiens’, meaning ‘wise’, for our inner-city-centric attitudes towards bushfire safety is hardly ‘wise’, we should have named our species using the term ‘sanctus’, referring to religion.
To wit, it matters not whether one believes that God invented man or vice versa. The human desire for religion is deep-seated and the archaeological record shows that it is not just a tendency for modern humans alone.
Where this strong theistic tendency meets modern Atheism a strange amalgam occurs. Some modern self-confessed and arguably well-educated Atheists actually sound rather like neo-Pagans. Carbon-dioxide-induced climate change is an article of extreme faith in such circles.
That is not to say that the avowedly religious cannot fall for a climate cult as well. Indeed, Australia’s churches are far too busy singing climate-hymns. They simply add to the cacophony that drowns out those who still call for rigorous scientific method with regards to climate studies and to bushfire control.
The widespread use of the term ‘deniers’ gives the game away. A denier is a modern heretic. This is not science. This is a witch-hunt. Like all good witch-hunts, the methodology is one of spreading all-pervasive fear, of what a perceived witch might do or of being mistaken for a witch personally.
All this comes to Australia under the guise of being suitably ‘progressive’. As with National Parks, being progressive is a good idea. Like National Parks, however, the problem lies in the removal of common sense from restricting what this might actually look like in the real World. Ultimately, what is really progressing along quickly thanks to this green religion would seem to be the bushfires. The modern witch-hunters appear relatively unbothered that vast chunks of rural Australia should burn at the stake each summer, while neatly blaming ‘climate-change deniers’ for not listening, acting and, effectively, making things even worse.
Even that cautious leftist, Eric Arthur Blair, writing as George Orwell, could not quite conceive how this future would arrive.
Personally, a fire arrived right here very recently. Fortunately, no lives were lost. The same cannot always be said elsewhere.
An issue arising from the fires is that some people believe that the Federal Government is responsible for the allocation of fire trucks. This is a State responsibility. The Federal Government can however use defense department assets and personnel to assist. The Federal Government is responsible for issues between States and between Australia and other countries. After the emergency the Federal Government will be responsible for providing welfare and roads.
I raise this topic because the mischievous media publicises the angry reaction by fire-affected people against the PM but does nothing to educate the public about the realities of government. The media in general supports centralised government. The media want politicians to attend fires so that it can record the local citizen’s reaction against them. What does the media expect of them? The overwrought citizenry attack the politicians, asking “Where are you in our time of need?!”, forgetting that the politician is there standing in front of them. Imagine the wild media response if the Prime Minister gave orders/instructions to a State-owned fire authority or fire truck driver. Both PM Morrison and previously the opposition leader, Albanese, have experienced unfair and angry criticism from fire victims. At the next great disaster the politicians will be able to claim “You don’t want us here.”
P.S. The ABC has not yet mentioned that the current high temperatures are due to the Earth experiencing the peak of a solar cycle.