Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t JoNova, and thanks to Eric Elsam – Duelling headlines; How much did arson contribute to this year’s deadly bushfire season?
‘Like nothing we’ve ever seen before’: police step up bushfire investigations
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Forty specialist police officers will work full-time on bushfire investigations to zero in on and profile would-be arsonists as the state continues to face the worst bushfire season in history.
The 19-year-old Strike Force Tronto has been investigating suspected arson cases since the horror season kicked off, and will now expand its remit to investigate all bushfires.
“A data collation and investigation plan has been developed to review the cause and impacts of the more than 1700 bushfires already reported to police; and consider the 12,000 fires recorded by the Rural Fire Service since August 2019,” police said in a statement released on Friday.
Of those 1700, police say that 716 were deliberate lit.
“They range from very minor behaviour right up to intentional arsonist behaviour – those that are listed as accidental right through to intentional,” State Crime Commander, Assistant Commissioner Stuart Smith, said on Friday.
He would not say what number of those were a result of arson or the deliberate lighting of fires.
Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/like-nothing-we-ve-ever-seen-before-police-step-up-bushfire-investigations-20200124-p53udv.html
The ABC, Australia’s government owned broadcaster, is having none of the arson narrative.
The truth about Australia’s fires — arsonists aren’t responsible for many this season
By Kevin Nguyen, Tim Brunero, Sarah Thomas,Daniel Keane and Nicole Mills
Updated 18 Jan 2020, 2:21pm
Only about 1 per cent of the land burnt in NSW this bushfire season can be officially attributed to arson, and it is even less in Victoria, the ABC can reveal.
The world has been shocked by the scenes of devastation as the unprecedented destruction of Australia’s horror bushfire season rages on.
The disaster has sparked significant media speculation that many of the blazes were deliberately lit.
While it is true firebugs remain a legitimate and serious threat, we crunched the numbers provided by police and fire authorities around the country.
The results might surprise you.
NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) Inspector Ben Shepherd said earlier this week lightning was predominantly responsible for the bushfire crisis.
“I can confidently say the majority of the larger fires that we have been dealing with have been a result of fires coming out of remote areas as a result of dry lightning storms,” he said.
In Victoria, where about 1.2 million hectares has burned, only 385 hectares — or 0.03 per cent — have been attributed to suspicious circumstances.
…
Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-11/australias-fires-reveal-arson-not-a-major-cause/11855022
Is arson a major contributor to the severity of Australia’s 2020 bushfires? For now I’m going with a qualified “no” – I don’t believe arson contributed significantly to the severity of this year’s fire season, though a lot more investigation is required to turn this qualified “no” into a firm conclusion.
For starters, the two competing viewpoints are to some extent comparing apples to oranges. Number of fires vs area burnt.
Fires deliberately lit tend near large towns tend to attract a rapid response, so it is no surprising deliberate fires are quickly extinguished.
On the other hand, fires deliberately ignited in densely inhabited regions could do disproportionate harm, even if only a small area is burnt before the fire is extinguished.
The police officers quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald are shocked at the number of fires lit by people this season, though they didn’t reveal how many of those fires were actually arson attempts vs arrogant disregard for fire restrictions.
There are also possible secondary effects from Arson – if firefighters are busy running around extinguishing deliberately ignited fires near towns, they aren’t free to fight fires in more remote locations.
Is Arson a serious problem? Absolutely – I think firebugs should be charged with attempted murder. It is horrifying that human lit fires have alarmed the police. Fires started by arsonists in inhabited areas could have done a lot of damage, despite only burning a comparatively small area of land.
But the real culprits which have made this year’s severe fires possible are the hot, dry weather, the irrational official persecution of individuals attempting to keep their properties safe, which has needlessly put many lives at risk, and political mismanagement of Australian woodlands and spineless appeasement of green anti-burn activists, which has allowed outrageous fuel loads to accumulate, turning much of Australia into a vast tinderbox.
We’ll always have arsonists, just as we shall always have to live with the possibility of lightning igniting fires. But there is a lot more we could be doing, to reduce the damage and harm fires do, regardless of their cause.
“… Of those 1700, police say that 716 were deliberate lit …” (NSW Assistant Commissioner Stuart Smith).
Whether started by arson of accident it makes no difference, it wasn’t Climate Change™
According to The Australian Government literature:
“… Bushfires can originate from both human activity and natural causes with lightning the predominant natural source, accounting for about half of all ignitions in Australia. Fires of human origin currently account for the remainder and are classified as accidental or deliberate …”:
https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/community-safety/bushfire
The ABC focus on arson, after ‘crunching the numbers’ their ‘investigators’ have concluded that “only 385 hectares — or 0.03 per cent — have been attributed to suspicious circumstances”, whatever that means.
Until official investigations have been completed it is pointless speculating as to the causes.
The very same ABC in 2015 referred to research that found that: “Most bushfires in south-eastern Australia caused by humans”:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2015-12-11/bushfires-in-south-east-australia-mostly-caused-by-humans/7013914
If the ABC ‘investigators’ are correct this fire season has been very unusual so far, or maybe they are anxious to play down direct human involvement in order to accentuate the default cause of everything else CC™.
Eric thanks for the post
The Royal Commission into the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday Bushfires which killed 173 people, stated “Nine of the 15 fires the Commission examined were started as a direct or indirect result of human activity; five were associated with the failure of electricity assets, and the causes of four were thought to be suspicious.”
In the the 2008/09 summer there was 17,000 fire incidents and over 300 on Black Saturday.
4/15 being suspicious is and issue.
Here in Victoria
Starting a fire intentionally is a crime with a possible jail sentence.
Starting a fire by negligence can also be a crime with a possible jail sentence.
The 17,000 fire incidents in 2008/09 included incidents such as a public rubbish bin on fire- on certain days that’s a crime.
The problem with the arson n vs not arson debate is in part due to lack of information released by police and there is certainly good reasons for that while investigations continue. The other problem is the data itself. One fire is not just one fire. In these high fuel load and dry conditions, one fire of origin can become the cause of hundreds if not thousands of spot fires which combine and become large fires in their own right. How the ‘number of fires’ is counted is very difficult to ascertain and certainly not simple to do. Burn area is by contrast very easy to quantify and has little to no correlation to number of fires. Journalism at this point has been too quick to promote their own view of causation but at best it should be regarded as purely speculation because the real story is not yet known. Only a few facts are admissible as evidence. Namely, fuel load has made disastrous fires inevitable, weather has played a role in drying out the landscape and providing the ideal conditions for combustion and combustion has occurred in a large number of locations. We do know for certain that some fires were started deliberately to cause harm. This is the true arson which is being investigated. We do know a number of fires were started inadvertently or by accident or even deliberately but with no intent to cause harm. These are not arson cases and nor are they ‘natural causes’. Lightning is known to have started some fires, the exact number is again very difficult to ascertain. In summary, the devil is in the data and until we know more, it is pointless to speculate overly much about causation.
Eric,
I am indebted to Dr. Jennifer Marohasy for her letter to supporters on 13 January, “ History is written or forgotten by the elites”
She comments that in terms of area burnt the bushfires of the last few weeks may be unprecedented but she attributes this to our mismanagement of the landscape including the lack of hazard reduction burning especially in eucalyptus forests.
She then quoted Justice Leonard Stretton from the 1939 Black Friday Royal Commission.
I will not set out the long extract but-
“1939 came at the end of a long drought…
….for twenty years Victoria had not seen its landscape in such travail…
…the bone dry tinder crackling underfoot …in the Forest floor…
… the rich plains denied their beneficent rains….
…dry heat and hot winds worked upon a land already dry to suck from it the last least drop of water…
And so it was that when millions of acres of the forest were invaded by bushfires which were almost State wide
there happened because of great loss of life and property the most disastrous forest calamity the State of Victoria had known.”
And then-
“ These fires were lit by the hand of man….”
Nothing of course about climate change although the concept of a warming world was well known at the end of the hot 1930s.
Dr. Marohasy argues that the summer of 1938-39 was at least as warm if not warmer than the present summer.
… fires happening where more people live and where rate of people growth is highest
mere correlation or causation?
I saw an article about the California fires and many of them were set! There will always be idiots who think it’s cute and funny to start fires! These people need to be caught and burned at the stake! Just sayin…
From the article: “I think firebugs should be charged with attempted murder.”
I agree.
I noticed that Fox News Channel has a Fox reporter who lives in Australia (Anna) and she has been making reports from there and insisting that only one or two percent of the fires were started by arsonists, and now I know why. She is getting her information from Australia’s government-owned broadcaster.
Wasn’t it just about five years ago that Oz got three years of good rainfall that refilled the reservoirs, and then the last two, plus this year, were very hot and dry? If so, those good wet years would grow a lot of extra foliage, that then would dry off over the last couple of years and provide extra burn material.
I tried Googling “rainfall in Australia by year”, but could it just return a link for a simple request like that? No. I got charts of averages, anomalies, charts that would have been what I wanted, but that stopped around 2010 or so. One would almost think that the search engines don’t want one to find such a simple chart.
I know if I spent more time I’d find what I wanted, but it seems odd that simple requests like that aren’t more quickly fulfilled.
Who Benefits from the fires? The alarmist government. So no doubt we won’t hear another word about the arsonists.
Yet – we know that 87% of all fires are either man-made or suspicious.(https://www.smh.com.au/national/arson-mischief-and-recklessness-87-per-cent-of-fires-are-man-made-20191117-p53bcl.html)
Therefore the single most effective way to stop fires is to stop people from setting them.
The second most effective way to stop fires is reducing fuel loads.
The least effective way to stop fires is by controlling the atmosphere.
So when the dingleberries carp on about reducing CO2 in the atmosphere ( at only .04% of the atmosphere) to prevent fires – have the confidence to call them out as ineffective dingleberries!
Haven’t over 200 been arrested for arson? Some with Arabic names? Look up “Pyroterrorism” on Wikipedia and Google it. The U.S. Forest Service had a big conference on Pyroterrorism. It’s simply Jihad on the Great Satan and Australia is part of Great Satan. Arabic magazines encourage arson by printing instructions on how to build remote-controlled incendiary devices. I know it’s not Politically Correct for the press to mention Pyroterrorism but it is real. When you have dry conditions that are favorable to big fires, some people take notice. Report any suspicious activity.
I’m a volunteer firefighter in a semi rural area of north Queensland. In general we have hot wet summers and cool dry winters so our bushfires are usually (but not always!) less serious than those further south. The vast majority of fires we attend are as a result of human activity, typically:
* cigarette butts
* angle grinding
* welding
* catalytic converter/hot exhaust (I started a very small fire myself with my tractor muffler)
* backyard burn gone wrong
In the school holidays we are often called to assist our urban colleagues to contain suspicious grass fires near populated areas. These are probably lit by school kids but there is rarely any evidence.
Arson by adults in this area is probably very rare but carelessness/stupidity is not.
It should also be borne in mind that the population of Australia was around 8 million in 1950 compared with 25 million today. Should we be surprised if there are more bushfires?
“Haven’t over 200 been arrested for arson? Some with Arabic names?”
No, and no.
What I can’t quite follow here is why the arguement over whether arson caused the fires or natural causes is a climate change issue. Are the alarmists suggesting that burning coal causes lightning to occur in forests causing devasting fires because CO2 causes drought which dries the forests and this creates the dangerous fireball. If arsonists caused the fires this somehow negates that climate change did it. Their arguments make no sense. Lightning wasn’t caused by climate change, there was no drought in the areas the fires occurred , fuel loads were at very high levels due to many factors including green policies. I don’t think any rational human being can understand how building more solar and wind farms, shutting down coal generated power, introducing a carbon tax or any CO2 reducing strategy would make any difference.
I actually think that the enthusiasm with which the greens and the left have seen fires as some apocalyptic pre cursor to a full on climate change CO2 driven Armageddon as stretching the credibility of the AGW debate in the minds of even their more ardent followers. Overseas alarmists have tried to exploit the fires to push harder on their cause not fully appreciating that all Australians understand that Australians always have and always will face serious bushfire risk on a regular basis.
Between the three states nearly 300 arsonists and would be arsonists have been caught. This number is ten to fifteen times the normal expected .Some kind of organisation seems obvious , and there are some very angry groups out who could do it. Lets hope the police release their findings, because all australians have a stake in it.
Eric”
One of the weather news services did an analysis of ‘lightning strikes’ and bushfires.
A dismally mall number of lightning strikes occurred anywhere near a fire’s ignition.
You may be able to dismiss “arson” as a primary cause, but manmade should still be the major source this year.
Unless, you’re blaming kangaroo, koala bears, rabbits, dingos or tasmanian devils for causing the fires.
385 hectares due to “suspicious circumstances”
I call bogus on this one.
Eric: Thanks for this article. Many question were addressed and many more will be asked and discussed as.hopefully apolitical analysis is undertaken. (Is this possible today?) Kudos to Pete for his Very astute comments.
I lived in the South of France for 18 years, almost all fires there are arson.
The question about these Aussie ones is whether they were started by climate change campaigners.
Dont forget, 2021 is around the corner and there has been a massive ramp up in CAGW hype, Greta, ER, etc. These fires look very suspicious to me.
Auto-ignition of wood requires more than 200 C: http://marioloureiro.net/ciencia/ignicao_vegt/wood_ign.pdf
Drying wood with ovens (about 100 C in one reference) is a normal industrial practice.
40-45 C in Australia is not enough. Making dry wood drier does not make it either.
My normal problem is to get firewood burning. Not an easy task. Winds can add more oxygen behaving like a turbo in an engine.
For curiosity, here is a list for gas, diesel, hydrogen, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoignition_temperature
Excellent comments and article. I’ll take a shot at it. The let nature take its course to save the planet crowd, that won’t allow clean up to prevent loss of life and property have no consideration that humans change a lot in nature for convenience and safety and profit. Humans build dams, dig drainage ditches, construct dikes, build roads, bridges, houses, and many other things. We have vaccinations, medicines, that prevent things from killing us. And much more.
Watts Up With That has published many articles on how wrong activists have been from the sea turtle, spotted owl to the Ozone layer, yet they are still given consideration as gifted watch dogs.
It is those who would turn back the clock to a terrible time to save the world, limit progress to what they decide is safe, who are the danger. If you have a watch dog you don’t want one that can’t tell you from an intruder and bites you. The dog probably feels OK, it has done its job.
I put NOTHING past these people. Michael Crichton’s State of Fear scenario is not that hard to imagine these kooks doing something like torching their country to get their demands met. End’s justify the means???
124 were already arrested for arson
Just as not all human deaths are murder, not all wildfires are arson. Some cases are obviously one or the other; others are perhaps legally decided although that question is not really settled to everyone’s satisfaction.
Someone accused of accidentally starting a forest fire in the middle of winter with several feet of snow on the ground would probably be in less legal danger than someone so accused when the forest is closed because of severe fire risk in the middle of summer.
Humans, not the rational creatures, the rationalizing creatures.
When you go into the woods, or out onto the plains, be sure that your fire is out, dead out. Then remember the families of Tanker 134 and pour some more water on it.