‘Stay inside’: City paralysed by smoke:
What a difference two months makes, it was only November when this photo was taken with ScoMo at one of the evacuation centres and it seems that RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons was a public enemy for claiming that the RFS funding hadn’t been cut despite NSW Labor’s claims it had. Two months later and the hero and villain roles have changed.
As for the arsonist claims, I think they’re valid, there’s a lot of the fires which have been started by human involvement - whether arson or accidental, they’ve still been started by human involvement rather than natural causes. There’s also a lot more people living in Australia than there were years ago and many of them have gone for the tree change and now living in the bush. That puts more people at risk. Of course I’m not dismissing climate change as also affecting the ferocity of them but I think there’s also several other contributing factors needing investigations and attention too.
In Tasmania the fuel reduction burns have definitely been opposed before, in Autumn and Spring regularly the Tasmanian Greens and Bob Brown Foundation and all of them have complained about the smoke being produced from them and the impact to the tourism industry so for them to claim they’ve never been against them is a bit of a porky.
I’ve also not seen much of Albo throughout all of this and he seems to be laying quite low, haven’t heard much from him since the election to be honest. He’ll need to be careful that he’s not flying too far under the radar.
He was seen visiting a lot of the places hit by fires and they have shown him rejecting claims by ScoMo.
I guess the media isn’t focusing on showing that every day though because there are bigger stories to tell right now and the prime minister’s actions or inactions are dominating the political news.
right now i prefure to have albo over scmo . at least albo was doing something while scomo was in hawaii ignoing what was happening here in australia
Surprised to see fires in Northern Australia on the map.
There’s been no coverage of those, and that I always thought the high humidity in those regions meant they were reasonably safe from bushfires at this time of year.
These maps aren’t all that accurate.
Why?
Things are looking up in the tropics:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/tropical-note/
This is no guarantee that there will be meaningful rainfall in eastern Australia, but we should at least see a more typical humid/stormy summer pattern emerging over the coming weeks. Parts of Sydney- including my suburb- had their first storm in ages last night.
Yes the IOD is becoming more favourable and the Pacific is heading toward a neutral - we can hope this brings some rainfall. We’ll need a strong and consistent drenching to break the drought.
The Pacific (El Nino/La Nina) has been neutral throughout; it’s the IOD and the Southern Annular Mode (polar westerlies) that have been responsible for the hot and dry weather in the east. The SAM is now returning to neutral also. Both of these shifted weather systems further north in late spring/early summer. The tropics remained hot and dry as the monsoon remained in the Northern Hemisphere, whilst Sydney still received westerly cold fronts.
‘I CAN’T STOMACH IT’: Decorated firey slams ‘outright lies’ circulating:
Look I don’t want to be too negative and it would be great if someone put me back in line but I want to know what you guys think. Someone said to me the other day I should stop donating via gofundme for the bushfires and instead donate directly to the causes. My work are also doing a fundraising event and someone at work said don’t donate just donate towards the cause. She said to me apparently companies and individuals set up the fundraises as a tax dodge and claim the donation as their own. Is this possible?
what i have seen money is what is needed now. and i think she maybe wrong . i know there are scammers out there claming there getting money for the fires when there not. maybe thats what they mean?? and i know there are heaps of genunie companies doing fundraising for the fires. so keep dontating tpo gofund me
Yes, I prefer to donate via a reliable source for major disasters eg. Salvos than GoFundMe.
There are certainly scammers out there who might be likely to set up fake pages via sites like GoFundMe trying to trick people into thinking it’s a valid site.
I agree. I will make donations to reliable charities like Red Cross, Salvation Army and (in the case of Gippsland bushfires) the Gippsland Emergency Relief Fund.
Quite a few media outlets have suggested that all donations should be going to the Red Cross, who are the most experienced in distributing donations.
I have donated directly to the Red Cross and the NSW RFS, via their respective websites. I also made sure that I clicked through to the donation page via the main page of their websites.
What will also be helpful for the affected communities, if you are able to, is to visit them later in the year when things settle down. Bear in mind that this is happening right in the middle of the summer holidays, when most of these towns get an influx of tourist dollars.
The air is totally clear in my part of Sydney at the moment, a dramatic difference to yesterday. Let’s hope for no more flare ups tomorrow.