The Good News And The Bad News
California can breathe a little easier because the West Fire, the Crown Fire, and the Bull Run Creek Fire are well under control and on their way to 100% containment tonight.
Alas, that is not the case in the rest of the world, as reported by the CBC –
In British Columbia an additional tragedy as a Water bomber crew confirmed killed
The company that owns a water bomber that crashed while battling wildfires in B.C.’s Fraser Canyon confirmed Sunday that the pilot and co-pilot of the plane are dead.
Crews can see the crash site, south of Lytton, but conditions are still too dangerous to reach the wreckage. They got within 500 metres of the scene Saturday night, Conair said.
There are reports the crash of the Convair 580, based in Abbotsford, sparked a new wildfire.
The water bomber went down just before 9 p.m. local time Saturday, about 15 kilometres south of Lytton, said Capt. Marguerite Dodds-Lepinski, the public affairs officer for the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Victoria.
About 1,000 firefighters are on the front lines across B.C., supported by air tankers, helicopters and heavy machinery, to battle more than 300 forest fires.
One fire in particular has forced 30 people from their homes in Cariboo Creek.
Evacuation orders or alerts have been issued for people living in a number of locations in the Kamloops area and Cariboo region as high temperatures and tinder-dry conditions continue.
In a summer that saw the highest temperatures ever recorded for Russia, the Russian army battles wildfires
Russian authorities have mobilized almost 240,000 people to battle deadly wildfires that have been burning across the country, killing at least 30 people in the last few days.
Army units, including elite paratroops, joined the firefighting effort Saturday.
Tens of thousands of hectares of parched forests and peat bog are either on fire or at risk of burning.
More than 700 wildfires have destroyed or damaged homes in nearly 80 towns or villages. Dozens of other communities are threatened by the fires, which have forced thousands of people to evacuate areas in the path of encroaching flames.
Russians are coping with the hottest summer temperatures since records were first kept 130 years ago.
The record heat wave and severe drought have dried up fields, ruining about a fifth of this year’s wheat harvest.
For those unfamiliar with peat bogs, they are normally like marshes, i.e. wetlands, which makes the situation similar to the fires in the Okefenokee Swamp during the drought in the Southeastern US.
4 comments
*sigh* The World really is screwed up!
I hope everyone stays smart and stays safe! As we know all too well here, bushfires do what they want and care nothing for life or property (sounds like Republicans, or conservatives here)! 😉
The Royal Commission into our bush-fires have finished and released their report. It’s pretty damning, but pretty much as was expected (by sane people anyway). One of the causes, and will become more of a problem, is our aging infrastructure that hasn’t been maintained since privatization (especially the overland power lines network). Which is what we all said would happen. Corp’s only care about profits. They should be given the massive bill, but that won’t happen of course.
So… What’s new? *shrug*
Here’s the final report for anyone who might be interested (4 volumes plus summary):
The 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission – Final Report
Info on the Comission, processes and media are here:
The 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Comission – Home
Maybe it will help someone there not make the same mistakes.
Anyway… Stay safe everyone!
California is just as bad. I had to tell a business who really wanted to upgrade to a much larger system that they didn’t have enough electrical capacity to do it. This was in an older business section of the city of San Diego, and not only was the “service entrance” [the big box with the meter and the connection from the power pole not heavy enough, but the transformer on the light pole and the overhead lines coming to the service entrance were too small to handle any increased load.
They could have handled the cost of the new service entrance, but the power company wasn’t about to replace the transformer and overhead lines unless the business paid for it. That was too expensive, and they didn’t do anything until they moved to a different location that was built to current standards.
Down here the large power lines are easy to spot from the air because they run through wide firebreaks in the pine forests. I’m fairly certain that the reason is that the military insists on it and in addition to being the largest customer in the area, the military allows them to run main lines through military property.
You will constantly read about firefighters in California having to protect power lines, because they aren’t kept clear of brush. and there is minimal redundancy in the system. If a line snaps from the heat, or from wind, it will land and start a fire. That almost never happens in Northwest Florida, even with hurricanes and tornadoes. It’s not like people are so crowded together in rural California or in Australia, that the lines couldn’t be essentially protected by the system we use.
I can’t imagine it would cost all that much to have sensors on main lines and shut down lines automatically when they snap. The technology has been around for decades. It has to be a lot cheaper now, than when it was done electro-mechanically with communication via landline telephone.
I’ve been reading the news reports on the commission, and you’re right: privatization = no preventative maintenance
When you reduce taxes on business, the extra money goes to profits, not to investment in their service. Nothing is fixed until it is obviously broken.
Actually, I’d change your last statement to read “Nothing is fixed until it’s too late to fix it”. Which of course will cost a lot more, and the companies always find a way to make people pay for the cost. People everywhere are just plain stupid.
The temp in Vic (and even Melb, on the coast) reached 46.5C (115.7F) by midday, after a 3day heatwave above 43C. We all knew the fires were coming. It wasn’t the first time, it won’t be the last. It’s as simple as that.
One of the biggest problems in 2009 was that for the previous several years, the State/Fed Gov had been sucking up to the minority lunatic Greeny fringe and stop burning off or removing the fuel (though the real reason was it gave the Gov an excuse to save money to spend on more important things, like trips and new Military toys, of course). The fires would still have happened, but as the report states (and as we all know) they would not have been as devastating.
What’s new… 😉
What’s really weird around here is that it is the military that is always doing the controlled burns. Because they are constantly doing weapons testing, they know full well that they can start a wild fire, so they do regular burns to keep things under control. It’s the paper companies and private owners who never clear brush or debris, and after a few direct hits from hurricanes, there’s a lot of it in the North County. If we hit a dry spell, the entire Panhandle and Southern Alabama are going up like a torch, while the Federal lands will be virtually untouched.
Fire is a natural part of the ecosystem. We did nothing but create problems for ourselves back in the days when we aggressively fought forest fires. Two of the recent fires in California were essentailly stopped when they hit areas that have burned in recent years. There wasn’t enough fuel to keep them going.
Yep, preventative measures are the first things to get cut when governments have other priorities, like things that go bang that are made by “generous” people.