Bruce's Rant

 

The rant below is by a guy called Bruce Walker who survived the Wytaliba fires in 2019. I am very entrenched and busy doing work with a local group calling for an enquiry into 'prescribed burns' (also called hazard reduction burns here by Bruce) I thought I would share this as it's topical.

Bruce Walker, Wytaliba Fire Survivior (12 November 2019)

Bruce Walker... “Hi everyone, my name is bruce walker, you might remember me from ABC TV yesterday, i'm one of the survivors of the wytaliba fires of last friday 8th november 2019.

responding to this well informed fuckwit here - Anthony G

so mate - first up, i've been an RFS volunteer for close to 20 years, and am part of the highly regarded Wytaliba RFS - one of the most respected and hardened crews on the northern tablelands and beyond. our crew number over 50 and include decorated vets of ash wednesday and many other national distaster catastrophic level fires.

regarding hazzard reduction. let me fill you in.

for my time here, we used to do managed hazzard reduction whenever it was viable in winter.

however - sadly, the moment gina and rupert* went halves and purchased the LNP wholesale, we saw a MASSIVE increase in wholesale industrial logging across the nation.

tell me, anthony - do you garden? do you use MULCH?

compare a mulched garden to a non-mulched garden. you'll see a near instant difference. if you're not schooled on how soil works, try standing all day in the sun with no hat on. what happens?

that's right, anthony. your head gets fucking hot.

that's what's happened to the planet. now. as anyone who's dabbled in, you know... physics, will spell out better than i can - an increase of just one degree is quite significant.

another neato thing physics talks about is the water cycle, anthony.

you see, part of the water cycle is this cool thing called "transpiration"

it's part 4 of this essential way in which trees send up moisture to meet clouds, creating low pressure troughs which draw rainfall inland.

in fact, it's physically impossible to get rain on the lee side of a mountain, without trees doing this very thing. impossible. ask the residents of the atacama desert in chile - who haven't had rain for one THOUSAND years. why? no fucking trees, anthony.

so anyway, back to the greens enacting a ban on burnoffs - that time we elected them to majority government and they had the final say.

when was that again, anthony? i'll wait.

nah. lets move on, since we ALL know this was never a thing . ever.

so anyway - here in wytaliba, we used to have an incredibly green lush valley - right up until industrial loggers finally broke in to compartments to our north. right about this time, there was a near instant and significant drop to our vital streamflow.

this happened again after each and every highland logging operation - and with LNP slashing and burning every national park in sight, well... you know, lets' not go there. climate change is a hoax, right?

so wholesale burn quotas came in with LNP too. this... well.. i just want to pause here and say "wow" because this did indeed make us say wow.

in recent years, we've seen hazzard reduction burns take place completely surrounding our once green, lush valley. so much so, that after the last july burn - of an area once supplying most of our water - well... 27 years of no burn had left a healthy and regenerating semi-arid rainforest. now it's simply arid nothing.

despite this burn and 3 more last year, we got the following result - fires flared up in this dry mulchless wasteland and burned for 6 weeks, destroying 2 more former rainforest areas, leaving them also tinder dry and unable to transpire - hasn't actually rained a drop since then. weird. almost like cause and effect took place.

clouds pass over, for sure. they get rain on the tablelands even - but - as physics reminds us, when air drops, it warms, expands, and rather than raining, sucks even more moisture from trees and soil.

oh well.

i mean, this is normal for australia, isn't it? watching 200 or more year old trees slowly wither and die right in front of you. that's normal. happens all the time. rivers dry up too, even though ours is home to platypi - who aren't known for travelling much - and hasn't dried up in probably 100,000 years minimum.

until last summer, and it's been bone dry since august.

this has never happened in my entire 25 or so years here. no local elders remember such a thing. wow.

now, we all know about the bees nest and kingsgate fires and the hundreds more around the state. my crew and many other heroic RFS volunteers have been fighting them for months on end.

yet another backburn actually got lit up about a month ago, on our south side, just half an hour before high southerly winds were due. the responsible paid agency, then ran out of paid hours, packed up and left it to spot onto our property and threaten 80 homes.

we're like the mujahideen of firefighting though, so we got it after about 10 days nonstop hectic battle.

this... brings us up to date, andrew. we've got bare, blacked out dust for 50km in all directions. right up to the actual eaves of half the homes here.

which is why, friday's hellstorm caught all of us by surprise, andrew.

a mushroom cloud went up at 3pm, 20 or so km away. within 30 minutes, high winds turned that into a 20km long front - strangely, this front was on ground burnt black as recently as 3 weeks ago - crown fires too, since every tree was literally a giant matchstick with dead leaves and nothing else.

this then switched to 80km/h southerlies and rained hell on 3500 acres of already blacked out ground.

well... you can't say we didn't prep or do hazzard reduction redneck style, can you andrew? or can you?

curiously, within 1 hour we'd lost 20 homes, a school, a fireshed, and a contrete fucking bridge - meaning only 2 outside units even got in to help.

falling trees in the hundreds blocked the old grafton road, so no one could even help neighbours.

by dawn, of 80 homes in our community, 52 were lost, 2 dead (one a sex party voter, the other aplotical - this one is for you, barnaby fucking joyce) we had many injured, thousands of local animals died, and.. it' looks like a warzone here. which it did almost before, except we had homes.

so, Anthony and ALL you fucking armchair experts out there, tell me. how again, was this the greens** fault?

thanks. looking forward to your well thought out response.

bruce walker, wytaliba RFS member and survivor".

Bruce Deliversrants Walker

* 'Gina & Rupert' refers to multi-billionare iron ore magnate Gina Reinhardt, and 'Rupert' is Rupert Murdoch, powerful owner of right-wing media in the US and Australia.

** The 'greens' for international readers refers to 'The Greens' - an Australian political party who are calling for action on climate change and have always advocated for the environment. It's who I vote for EVERY election.

Photo: ABC News article 'NSW bushfires: Inside the community that's now a ghost town after blazes ripped out its heart', Paige Cockburn.