Bushfire!

 For the past few days a massive bushfire has been rampaging through the hills near Perth. Starting near Wooroloo - a small wheatbelt town - it has already brought some of the outer suburbs of the city under threat. Over 70 homes have been lost and there's a strong likelihood there will be more. I live well into suburbia but the suburb adjoining us received a warning that ash and smoke were expected throughout the day and we could see and smell both as the houses there, which are only about a 15-20 minute walk away from us, disappeared into the haze. We were warned to turn off evaporative air conditioners - the most common form of air conditioning in Perth - and keep houses closed up which with a maximum temperature of 34°C meant we were in for an uncomfortable day even without the threat of a fire. As well we were warned to be watchful for signs of fire and be aware that ember attack can precede the actual fire for up to 100 metres. (As we learned during last year's disastrous fires in eastern Australia, the 100 metres measure can be exceeded if there are strong winds so this is not comforting.)

My niece and her family, who now live on a rural bush block north of the city, have been told to be prepared to evacuate if the fire continues to move in their direction and where they used to live - quite suburban and densely populated - has already been evacuated. With wind gusts of 70 kmh forecast for this evening the prospects of containing the fire don't look good. Here on the coast we've already been experiencing strong gusty south westerlies for most of the afternoon which has at least mitigated the spread in our direction but does not bode well for those in the north and north east. All this on top of the total lockdown of the south west of the state due to COVID 19 means stress on stress. 

There is good happening, too, though. Most people have responded well to the lockdown. Very few have objected to the restrictions and the face masks which we were warned we should get weeks ago have been pulled out and and are being worn. There are, of course, a small number who are so invested in their conspiracy theories that they can't give them up but by and large most of us are complying without complaint. We know it's in the interest of the community as a whole. 

There are other signs of a healthy community, too. A number of motels - empty because of the lockdown - are providing free accommodation to evacuees from the fires, go fund me pages are being set up to assist those who have lost their homes and all their possessions and local community groups and individuals are collecting goods for distribution to those in need - and that's only a small part of what is being done. Makes me proud of my city and my fellow Western Australians.

Windy Days and Consequences

I live not far from the coast close to the top of a hill and my house is oriented pretty much to the north. This means there's only with only a small part in full sun at any time of the day. The front where the afternoon sun would otherwise beat down on the front of the house is shaded by a huge and very lovely marri tree. And I'm used to windy days. They are part of what makes summer living here so pleasant.  We get the cool easterlies from inland in the summer - well, they're cool in the early mornings until the land heats up by mid morning and then the The Doctor - the sea breeze - arrives around midday or a little later and cools it down again.

Sounds great and usually it is but this year is not quite the same. I mentioned a while back that we've already hit 40° C several times and, while this is not unheard of, it is more common in February, not December and early January. Then there's the wind - and recently it hasn't been our friend. 

Early in the evening of New Year's Day quite suddenly after a warmish humid day the wind decided it was tired of gentle breezes and sent us a blast of furious and hot easterly gusts which have only just started to ease a little. The gusts were so strong they blew down the shade cloth covers over my veggies, tore small branches off my neighbour's trees while each gust rattled the windows making sleep difficult and the sea breeze? Forget it. 

While all this wind has been exhausting there are other consequences. We've had bushfires in several outer suburbs with mass evacuations required while several are raging out of control a bit further up the coast to the north of the city. We have bushfires every summer, some years worse than others - a couple of years ago a whole town was destroyed - so fires aren't unexpected and fortunately so far at least they are nothing like the scale of those that wreaked havoc on the east coast last summer. Folk there are slowly rebuilding their lives with many still living in caravans and sheds - and for those in the mountains it was a long, cold winter. However, it's only the start of the bushfire seasons so we can't afford to get complacent and the fierce winds are making any fire control difficult to impossible. 

The truth is the British who came here as colonists made some bad mistakes as far as farming and other land use was concerned. While fire has always been present here - most of the continent is hot and dry and always has been - the indigenous people those colonists supplanted had had something like 60,000 years of living with and managing it. Instead the newcomers disrupted systems that had sustained many generations and tried to transplant European land management to an alien and completely different landscape. It was successful for a time - Australia was supplying large amounts of meat, wheat and wool to the world market for more than a hundred years - but now the consequences of that form of agriculture and the logging of our old growth forests are showing in salinity, dust storms and out of control bushfires.

How we are going to deal with these problems I don't know - successive governments have shown little ability to grapple effectively with them - but we certainly need to. It's probably too late to go back to the indigenous systems but we certainly need to do something. Climate change is happening whether we like it or not. It will bring more damaging fires and other consequences. We ignore it at our peril.

A-Z Blogging Challenge: Smoke

We woke up this morning to a thick smoke haze - and yesterday was the same. It's burn off season when the Department for Parks and Wildlife burns selected areas of bush land and forest in an effort to prevent wildfires in the following year.

There is some debate as to whether burning is a good idea. There is inevitably harm to wildlife and many people find this distressing. Birds and animals will die or be injured, food supplies for the survivors will be lost and nesting sites like hollow logs will be destroyed. All of this is very sad and  I believe very few of us would deliberately set out to harm wildlife. I certainly would never endorse harming any creature. I'm a vegetarian for heaven's sake. On the other hand, though, I can see the need for burning because over many thousands of years our bushland has adapted to living with fire. Eucalypts are highly flamable due to their volatile oils so even without human intervention there have always been bushfires and many Australian plants won't germinate without exposure to smoke. As well, the Australian Aborigines, the original inhabitants of Australia, used fire to modify the landscape and provide areas of new growth for hunting. This produced what early explorers described as a park like land when they first came here. Fire is part of what makes Australia and we have to accept that.

The thing is, if we don't burn, there will be much more severe fires and these fires are far more destructive of wildlife than prescribed burns. Of course prescribed burns don't always go as planned. They can get away and spread further than intended, even turn into bushfires sometimes, and there's always the problem of smoke. For asthma sufferers like me that's more than just an irritation and we've had to have the house completely closed up for days this summer with smoke from bushfires and prescribed burns. Even so I think it's worth putting up with this to protect the community at large from wildfires. We've seen some terrible examples of this with loss of life and homes in Australia in recent years and I can't believe anyone would wish to see that again.

Bushfires

We are in the middle of the bushfire season here in Western Australia. They are a seasonal hazard when your forests are largely eucalyptus and summers are long, hot and dry. Add in nearly a week of violent electrical storms - this is not quite so normal. Storms do occur at this time of the year but for there to be so many and for such a long period is unusual - and you have lightning strikes igniting fires as well, unfortunately, as others started by arsonists. There's always a flurry of the latter towards the end of the summer school holidays when bored kids - mostly boys between 9 and 17, according to the police, with a fascination with fire and no comprehension of how destructive it can be - get into mischief. 

There have already been several serious fires on the outskirts of the city itself over the past three weeks but they are now out. Friends who were evacuated when their homes were under threat said they were quite terrifying but, with no fuel left, those areas, at least, should be safe for a while. It brought back memories of when I was a child and a night when my parents gathered my brother and me up out of bed as a fire bore down on where we lived. It stopped before it reached our place but I can still feel the heat ahead of it and see the flames racing towards us as if they were some giant monster devouring everything in front of them.

While those fires are done with, other parts of the state are not so lucky and are now under threat. There is a major fire burning in the heavily forested southern part of the state approximately 400 kilometres from us - towns have been evacuated and there has been stock and property loss - and another is threatening several towns in the farming areas around 170 kilometres south of here. 

With fires comes smoke and the prevailing winds are driving masses of it from both fires north to the city and beyond.

This is the view from just outside my back door across the large park in the valley around 8:00 AM. You can see blue sky and greenery but on the horizon an ominous pall of smoke is moving in. Even then the air reeked of smoke.

The two photos below were taken from slightly different angles around 11:50 AM. The blue sky has completely disappeared, blocked out by the smoke, which is hazing the neighbouring buildings and even the plants in the garden. 

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I would have taken more photos but the smoke was overwhelming and my eyes are still stinging nearly an hour later. But this is merely an inconvenience for most people here in the city and my heart goes out to those whose homes and livelihoods are under threat and to the animals caught up in the inferno.