http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires

for the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday fires which killed 173 people – the worst in our history.

Plus see :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Canberra_bushfires

for the 2003 Canberra bushfires which claimed the Mt Stromlo observatory as well as four lives and 500 plus homes and burnt well into the suburban outskirts of our national capital.

As well as seeing :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfires

for more on Aussie bushfires generally.

I think they’re all concentrating on the other ‘Icebergs Off Greenland’ thread – but, then again, famous last words ..

As an Aussie living in a bushfire zone, yeah, this is eerily familiar and somewhat disturbing stuff.

Yes, fire is a natural part of our environment and this region’s dynamic ecology. The Indigneous Australians have even had for tens of thousands of years a practice of “firestick farming” although I’m not sure about locally.

But recent fires have been bad, the ecology has been altered – olives and pines don’t respond in the same way as eucalypts and native scrub – and we’re here now in different times and circumstances including climate change caused worse droughts, heatwaves and, yes, worse bushfires too. The Canberra and Victoria and Sydney bushfires in the past five years or so being recent extreme and tragic Aussie examples.

When you’ve a house full of books and pets and all, its a major concern.

Be prepared, have a plan, hope for the best, be ready for the worst.

However those landscapes are very vulnerable to fires and real protection involves clearing all trees and ground litter out a good 100 m away from buildings and other valuables. And this cannot wait until a fire approaches. It must be a permanent or near permanent state of affairs. That does not quite match the usual ideal of a tree-shaded home.

I suppose you could have a fire break outside of a permanent living zone, with trees within. However you start needing quite a substantial plot of land to make such spacing happen.

Phil seems to have the mindset that fire=bad. While that may be true in some places, it is not true in the mountains of the Front Range of Colorado. The forest ecosystem in that area evolved in a semi-arid environment that has historically seen dry summers, especially when the North American Monsoon is not strong (as was the case in June, which is before the North American Monsoon generally starts).

The forest ecosystems evolved to be burned every 150 years or so. After the fire you get so-called “pioneer species” like aspen trees, and those species are generally out-competed by evergreen trees like pine and spruce, and we are left with an evergreen forest. Indeed, the presence of recently burned areas and areas that have been burned in the past provides ecological diversity that we would not otherwise have. Also, the fact that we act so quickly to stop forest fires only makes them larger and “more destructive” due to the obvious increase in fuel.

Of course the loss of property and life is a tragedy, the forest itself is not “destroyed” as Phil puts it. It is transformed into a different stage of ecological development as has been happening in this ecosystem for a very long time. The cause of the fire is not important, as naturally started and artificially started fires have the same ecological effect.