LogFAQs > #932361463

I want to talk about something wind for a second.

Our last bushfire catastrophe was in early 2009, and we called it Black Saturday: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires

It burned 450,000 hectares of forest and grassland. Towns were destroyed. 173 people died. Many were left homeless.

Our fire warning system, up to that point, had five warning levels:

• low moderate
• high
• very high
• severe
• extreme

Black Saturday added a sixth warning level: Catastrophic.

That's how bad Black Saturday was.

This is how bad things are now. Keep in mind, these bushfires have been happening since November: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bushfire_season

Good news first: only 19 people have died, as opposed to 173.

Bad news? 5,900,000 hectares are estimated to be lost. That's over 12 times more than Black Saturday.

Here are some crisis map screenshots I took yesterday - they're probably wildly out of date now, but they're worth checking out now.


See that massive criss-cross of streets down the bottom there? That's the entire city of Sydney. Five million people live there. Look at both of the fires next to it.


This is the affected area around Grafton. The blue symbols indicate that they aren't out of control, but you should stay up to date to make sure they don't get worse.

Why did I take a screenshot of Grafton? Because my dad lives there. Look at that tiny dot - it's a moderately sized town. Tiny compared to Sydney - the population is apparently like 19,000 people. But that's where my dad lives. And that black outline is the area that has been affected by fires.

If he flees south, he runs into the Port Macquarie fires and he puts himself at risk of running into the fires near Sydney. But he can't go north, and he can't go west.

I'm not at risk compared to other towns. I'm extremely lucky for that. But it's pretty rough seeing town after town get levelled by bushfires. The last time we had a bushfire this bad, we had to add another level of warning to our bushfires danger scale. What the fuck are we gonna do this time? How do we come back from this, and safeguard ourselves from experiencing it all over again?

Because we had professionals who warned our government about the dangers. We had people who were in charge of handling Black Saturday and its aftermath, and these people are being turned away because they factor climate change into things. Even now, our PM only mentions climate change in the same breath as "as well as other factors which are equally as culpable".

Our fire services have been getting budget cuts for the better half of a decade, now. They were facing a $40 million budget cut in 2020 before the country started burning to the ground. We're in this mess due to lack of funding, and because the people with any kind of power at the moment - our politicians - wouldn't listen to the professionals who spent years fighting Australia's deadliest fires over party politics.

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