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Cops and arson unit round up 24 alleged arsonists in Au/NSW.
New South Wales Police have caught 24 alleged firebugs accused of deliberately lighting bushfires in a catastrophic season that has so far killed 18 people in the Australian state.
Two dozen people have allegedly risked prison sentences of up to 25 years by choosing to light bushfires, despite the potential to kill and cause millions of dollars of damage.
Strike Force Tronto, made up of detectives from the Financial Crimes Squad's Arson Unit, have been working closely with local police forces to catch arsonists.
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Au/NSW Rural Fire Service fireman charged with starting seven bushfires
Full statement from the NSW Rural Fire Service
“The NSW Rural Fire Service (NSW RFS) has immediately stood down a volunteer member who has been charged over an alleged arson incident on the south coast.
NSW Police have charged the 19 year old member with seven counts of cause fire and be reckless to its spread.
NSW RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said the Service has a zero tolerance to arson.
“Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen firefighters going above and beyond in difficult and dangerous conditions.
“Our members will be rightly angry that the alleged actions of one individual can tarnish the reputation and hard work of so many.
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Policeman explains on camera that 54 more suspicious people have been arrested for arson
Published on Nov 19, 2019
Since August this year, 54 suspicious people have been arrested for 69 bushfire-related offences in NSW.
Police say these people were charged over the bushfires - some received cautions, others slapped with criminal charges.
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Aboriginal planners say the bush 'needs to burn'
Long before Australia was invaded and colonised by Europeans, fire management techniques - known as "cultural burns" - were being practised. The cool-burning, knee-high blazes were designed to happen continuously and across the landscape. The fires burn up fuel like kindling and leaf detritus, meaning a natural bushfire has less to devour.
Experts agree that cultural burning has limitations, partly because colonisation led to development and human-created climate change, presenting us with a very different landscape now to hundreds of years ago. Prof Preece has been in areas where, day after day, the conditions for cooler cultural burning weren't right. "It'd be too moist, too cool, too hot, too dry - you have a narrow window. And with many firefighters in Australia being volunteers, they're working during the week, and you could go four Saturdays till the conditions are right."
Australia is burning now because they followed the "experts" advice and ignored the natives who have lived there for about 100,000 years without this problem. From the folks that brought you cane toads...
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Australia fires: Misleading maps and pictures go viral
One image shared widely by Twitter users, including by singer Rihanna, was interpreted as a map, But it is actually artist Anthony Hearsey's visualisation.
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The recent fires in Victoria were driven by big fuel loads, not by the weather.
The fire danger index was a surprising low 16-20, but the high fuel loads resulted in predicted rates of spread of 0.5 kph and flame heights up to 10m.
In comparison, the fire danger index on Black Saturday 2009 reached around 130 -180. The FFDI is a measure of the speed, flame height and spotting distance.
There is a disturbing trend to:
- Leave fuel loads unmanaged,
- Blame fire crews for not doing enough, when they struggle to deal with fires driven by large fuel loads and unfavourable conditions,
- Wait for the fire to come to us (it builds momentum as we wait), and
- Blame climate change for these large and destructive fires.
We should be:
- Managing fuel loads using cool / Indigenous burning techniques that were also once used by early settlers, farmers and graziers,
- Restore the engagement of farmers and other land owners in early suppression options like tanker trailers and slip-on firefighting units,
- Invest in early fire detection technologies like fire towers and scanning equipment (smoke, heat and other fire detection systems have reduced the frequency and severity of structural / building fires)
- Once fuel loads are better managed, we can get back to basic firefighting techniques to help reduce the size of these fires.
- It is the fuel loads that create the biggest problem
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Defining the Greens (Part 16) and Bushfires
(NB I find this article in part to be hysterical red-bashing and utterly without merit. The historical evidnce is really all I've included it for. - rjs)
In 1994, Ray Evans bought a cottage at Marysville (Victoria, Australia) which he and his wife subsequently renovated and extended. The cottage and its extensive garden were destroyed by fire on the night of Saturday February 7 – now known as Black Saturday. In the following provocative and political article Mr Evans blames the fire “on green doctrine” and the Victorian government wilfully ignoring the advice of a previous inquiry because it did not want to “offend the sensitivities of the Greens”.
“IN 1966 the Victorian government published a booklet entitled Summer Peril. On the cover was a terrifying photo of the 1964 Lorne bushfire. The foreword was by the Premier, Sir Henry Bolte, who began: “Over the years our state of Victoria has been plagued by bushfires leading to tragic loss of life and devastation of natural resources, public and private property.”
The booklet offers practical advice to farmers and rural landholders about the precautions they should take to minimise the risk to their property and what to do if bushfires should engulf them. One noteworthy sentence declares: “Anyone who ignores warnings about the fire risk during acute danger periods must be a fool, and a selfish, ignorant and stubborn one at that.”
The report by the Environment and Natural Resources Committee of the Victorian Parliament Inquiry into the Impact of Public Land Management Practices on Bushfires in Victoria, July 2008, lists twenty-three bushfires from 1965 until 2008, resulting in the deaths of 102 people. On February 7, 2009, Black Saturday, 173 people died. Those words from 1966 now have a prophetic ring to them.
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Properly managing fire loads
(NB - this article does not work if you click on the link. You have to cut and paste it into a browser, then ut will work. It will work if you click on it from Google however)
Firestorms follow move away from cool burning
12:00AM JANUARY 4, 2020
Christine Finlay has been sounding the alarm on bushfires in Australia for more than a decade after tracking the relationship between reduced cool burning and the frequency of firestorms. And the Queensland-based fire researcher, who charted a century of archival bushfire records for her PhD, has long been screaming danger.
Finlay’s thesis examined problem bushfires between 1881 and 1981. What she found after plotting the historical data on a graph was that there was a marked increase in the size and frequency of fires after 1919. This was when bushfire-reduction operations increasingly moved away from traditional indigenous practices such as low-intensity cool burning.
Finlay says this detailed correlation between the accumulation of catastrophic fuel loads and the frequency of extreme bushfires made it possible to forecast the dramatic increase in firestorms we have seen in the 21st century.
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31,000 Australian bushfires are either arson, or suspected arson, every year.
Two of the most recent studies say there are between 52,000 and 54,000 bushfires in Australia every year.
Dr Paul Read, co-director of Australia's National Centre for Research in Bushfire and Arson, puts the figure higher, at "62,000 and increasing".
Of those, 13% are started deliberately, and 37% are suspicious. That means 31,000 Australian bushfires are either arson, or suspected arson, every year.
That figure does not include recklessness or accidents. So a bushfire caused by a barbecue, or a spark from a chainsaw, would be classed as "accidental".
In short, up to 85 bushfires begin every day because someone leaves their house and decides to start one.
One man told ABC that he started a bushfire after finding out his girlfriend was sleeping with someone else. "I'm not a person to let my anger out by punching or anything like that," he said.
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The childish myth that global warming caused the bushfires in Australia.
The long, severe drought in Australia, culminating in the most extensive bushfires in recent history, ought to have aroused sympathy for the cattle-ranchers who have lost their livestock and the citizens who have lost their homes. But no. Instead, those who profiteer by asserting that global warming is the cause of every extreme-weather event have rushed to state – falsely – that an “overwhelming scientific consensus” (to cite the Greens’ website) blames the incidence, extent, duration and severity of the drought and bushfires on the somewhat warmer weather caused by our having increased the atmospheric CO2 concentration by about 1 part in 10,000 from 0.03% to 0.04% by volume.
Drought, then, is not exactly a new phenomenon in Australia. And with drought comes fire. Indeed, the aborigines or First Nations, or whatever the fashionable woke soubriquet is this week, used to conduct frequent controlled burnings of the scrub on the forest floor, precisely to prevent the continent-wide bushfires that they knew from thousands of years’ experience were bound to occur otherwise.
In 1642 Abel Tasman wrote of the smoke in the sky and the scorched trees wherever his expedition landed. Captain James Cook described the same conditions in 1770. This deliberate burning created the grassland landscapes that dominated pre-European Australia.
There are four further methods of hindering the spread of bushfires: livestock grazing, mechanical clearance of the scrub to create firebreaks; damming streams to keep well-stocked reservoirs so that if a fire starts there is enough water on the spot to put it out; and policing the forests to prevent arson, some of it at the hands of environmentalist extremists trying to “raise awareness” of global warming. Thus, the prophylactic measures available are slashing, burning, grazing, damming and policing.
Yet the first four of these sensible and prudent measures are either banned outright or heavily over-controlled by environmental regulations. Peter Manuel gave me an example. A resident of a small settlement in the bush cleared a small amount of scrub on his own land around his own house. The enviro-Nazis of the local administration took him to court for illegal destruction of valuable natural vegetation. The court – for custard-faced judges these days are increasingly remote from mere reality and easily infected by barmy environmentalism – fined the blameless villager $100,000. Not $100. A breathtakingly disproportionate $100,000.
The innocent citizen got the last laugh, though. A bushfire raged through the district the following summer, destroying every single house, barn and steading in that settlement, except his own, which survived unscathed. And did They refund his $100,000? No, of course not.
Worse, They did not learn the lesson from this incident, which is that the aborigines knew what they were doing because they had been doing it for hundreds of generations. The enviro-zombs, despite the anxious pleas of groups such as Peter Manuel’s Farmers’ and Landowners’ Group Australia, have hitherto refused to alter their insane policy.
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Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics
When considering fire statistics, fires with larger areas do not necessarily translate into more serious impacts on human settlements. For example, of all the fires that occurred during January 1994 in New South Wales, one of the most damaging was one of the smallest, burning just 476 ha but destroying 101 houses. This was more than half of the total houses lost in New South Wales during that bushfire emergency period.
o "The bushfires which occurred at the end of 2002 and beginning of 2003 were among the most protracted and extensive experienced since European settlement of Australia"
o "The 'Black Thursday' fires of 6 February 1851 in Victoria, burnt the largest area (approximately 5 million ha) in European-recorded history"
o "Between December 1938 to January 1939, 1.5-2.0 million ha were burnt, 71 people were killed and over 1000 homes destroyed in Victoria (DSE 2003b, 2003c). The most devastation occurred on 'Black Friday', 13 January 1939, when strong northerly winds intensified fires burning in almost every part of the state. Townships were destroyed and others badly damaged. So much ash and smoke was generated that ash fell as far away as New Zealand (DSE 2003c)"
o "In 1944, bushfires in Victoria burnt an estimated one million ha, killed between 15 and 20 people and destroyed more than 500 houses (DSE 2003b)."
o "The 'Ash Wednesday' fires of 16 February 1983 caused severe damage in Victoria and South Australia. In Victoria, 210,000 ha were burnt, 2,080 houses destroyed, more than 27,000 stock lost and 47 people lost their lives (CFA 2003a; DSE 2003b, 2003d). Property-related damage was estimated at over $200m and more than 16,000 fire fighters, 1,000 police and 500 defence personnel fought the fires in Victoria. In South Australia, 208,000 ha were burnt, 383 houses were destroyed, 28 people were killed and property-related damage was estimated to be more than $200m (DSE 2003d)."
o "Serious bushfires occurred in New South Wales in 1951-52, 1968-69, 1984-85 and 1993-94. In 1968-69 over one million ha were burnt and three people were killed (Linacre & Hobbs 1977; RFS 2003a). In 1984-85, 3.5 million ha were burnt, four lives were lost, 40,000 livestock were killed and $40m damage to property was caused (RFS 2003a). In 1993-94, bushfires burnt 800,000 ha, destroyed 287 residential properties and other premises and killed four people (Year Book Australia 1995 (1301.0)). At the height of the 1993-94 fires, over 20,000 firefighters were deployed (RFS 2003a)."
o "in 1974-75, following lush vegetation growth due to heavy rainfall in the previous two years, over 117 million ha or 15% of the total land area of the continent was burnt in central Australia during the fire season (Year Book Australia 1995 (1301.0))."
o "A number of the fires were caused by lightning strikes associated with seasonal change (Bushfires Council of the Northern Territory 2003). These fires are part of the natural cycle and also a tradition in Aboriginal people of the region. Up to 50% of the northern Australian landscape is burnt each year, and most areas are burnt at least once in every three years (Anderson 1999)."
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Australia fires: arson to blame
o "A 2008 study found that in Australia about 85% of fires were triggered by human activity - this includes arson, but also carelessness or recklessness."
o "According to Australia's National Centre for Research in Bushfire and Arson, 13% of bushfires every year are deliberate and 37% are suspicious."
o "In the US state of California, 95% of wildfires are started by people - 7% of those by arson - according to Cal Fire, the state's fire service."
o "This figure of 183 may have come from an article in the Australian newspaper referring to the number of cases of alleged arson since the start of 2019, and not limited to the recent widespread outbreak of fires which began in November"
o "Police in New South Wales, a state which has suffered some of the worst blazes, have charged 24 people for deliberately lighting a fire during the current fire season (since 8 November)."
o "But we do know that in Queensland, police say just 114 fires out of 1,048 (about 10%) have been deliberately or recklessly lit through human involvement between September and 8 January."
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One of the most shocking slides in Dr. Soon’s video was an environmentalist and climate activist, who was convicted in court of deliberately setting fires.
Video of Dr. Willie Soon at his awesome best, obliterating the absurd climate driven wildfire narrative under the weight of the evidence he presents.
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