Terrible fires combined with record breaking heat wave in Australia

Mark Richardson writes from Australia:

Regarding the Australian bushfires, the report in the Telegraph is misleading. The report suggests that the identikit suspect is responsible for the fires which have killed over 180 people.

In fact, there have been dozens of fires, several of which have wreaked enormous destruction. The photofit suspect has been linked to a fire along a river in a Melbourne suburb which firefighters managed to contain (it will be interesting to discover his motivation if he is caught).

The man arrested in Churchill is thought to be responsible for one of the deadly fires. Churchill is a small town in Gippsland, a region which is still largely untouched by mass immigration. It’s most likely that the man arrested is an Anglo-Australian.

It’s been an extraordinary week here in Melbourne, particularly in the north-eastern suburbs where I live. Last Saturday we had the hottest temperature on record (46.3 degrees celsius in my suburb which is 115.3 degrees fahrenheit) combined with a roaring hot northerly wind. It hasn’t rained so far this year, so the eucaplytus forests are tinder dry.

Most of the people who died lived in small settlements 15 to 30km away from my suburb. They had little chance of escaping fires travelling at 120km per hour. Whole families have perished in their homes, in their cars and even in buildings in the middle of towns.

A relative of mine lives in a tiny community of a few hundred people. He fought the fire and saved his house, but about 30 died. When I went to help him with repairs about 6 hours after the fire went through, the whole area looked like a war zone. Everything was charcoal black, houses were reduced to smouldering ash, burnt out cars lined the road, some of the electricity poles were on fire, others had already collapsed.

The fires are still burning and smoke still fills the air. Fortunately the weather has been cooler, so the volunteer firefighters—whose efforts have been heroic—have been able to prevent further large-scale casualties.

The papers are publishing photos of those who perished. It’s not an easy thing to respond to, especially as there are so many young people. There is a sense of numbed depression, alongside sympathy for the victims. The appeals set up to help the several thousand made homeless by the fires have raised a tremendous amount of money.

The hope is that it will rain soon.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 13, 2009 07:08 PM | Send