NAFI are losing the momentum on this one, and their cover is blown. For 5 decades they logged rainforest and wet old growth forest types - no doubt all around Kinglake West, Marysville, Kilmore etc. They got their way in the main. Now look at the pictures in The Australian of blacked trees to the horizon back to Melbourne. They don’t show fuel load - what they show are state forest logging zones on the mountain above Kinglake that were skinny dry sclerophyll regrowth. The kind that burns the way wet old growth and rainforest doesn’t burn.

Let’s get the harvesting plans out for the last 50 years. The timber volumes chipped per logging coup to indicate tree size, and species. Let’s see what areas burned today as dry sclerophyl that used to be wet old growth and rainforest decades ago before the 8M tonnes a year woodchip sector mined the trees for chips and converted it all to dry sclerophyl. Before climate extremes turbo charged the regrowth wick and negligence or criminality lit it all up.

There will be some areas that were always dry sclerophyl but in a mosaic. Now its monoculture dry forest type. Thankyou rednecks. No wonder they don’t want to talk land tenures or statistics of firestorm origins. It was the same in NSW in 1994. Damning stats of their own land use failures in state forest and less extent private farm land, and greed. Damn their impudence. They systemically killed off our wet forests over 5 decades and want to blame the greenies for that? Get real.

The Herald Sun moderators have pulled it off comment from the public by the look of things here:

Need action to prevent similar disasters
Rob Incoll
February 16, 2009 12:00am

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25058241-5000117,00.html

God I hope 4 Corners tonight give the loggers what they deserve after their fun at the expense of green people many of them fatal victims of their logging legacy in central Victoria.

How long until the power company being sued joins the state forest agency as a co-defendant, or even some of these dog woodchippers? Their actions of destroying wet forest were “reasonably foreseeable” for expert foresters to quote Donoghue v Stevenson. Turning wet forest into dry across whole landscapes was always going to lead to bushfire/wildfire/megafire.

Jim should be sent on a lecture circuit to show his fellow bush-dwellers what simple and relatively inexpensive measures can save a house (and thereby save themselves). It would be worth much more than the official bureaucratese that is likely to come out of any government enquiry in which the health-and-safety brigade will most likely propose the usual over-the-top and unaffordable, impractical measures.

Who allowed the shonky building standards to take over the building industry? Deliberately shaving off any impediment to survival in order to sell cheap sub-standard buildings? Who allowed people to build houses smack up against national forests? Who allowed town planners to construct cul-de-sacs in high fire danger areas? Who allowed the sheer numbers of people to move into these fragile areas? Streets which once had two or three houses now having forty houses: whilst failing to maintain any infrastructure? Who allowed people to build in these areas without building fire shelters? Who thinks it’s more important to tender for the next available Olympics, or to spend 500 million dollars to up-grade the Rod Laver arena? Who has allowed the construction of a power-hungry desalination plant, to be fueled by brown-coal? Who has quickly called for a royal commission, in order to deflect the guilt of allowing all of these things to happen? Who allows the barbarism of the Formula one car racing event to happen on a yearly basis?

Once you’ve worked these questions through, you might ask yourselves if it would have been better under a government led by the state Coalition? Personally, I don’t think so. Instead of the present government just accepting payments from the developers, the Coalition would probably have tendered for the tender, as it were. Throughout our history our various states’ governments have been reveling in sh-t. Occasionally nature bites back. And people are fried alive. And we all know governments are seldom held to account for anything.

The policy of making the decision to go or stay can only if work if you have the necessary knowledge of dangers to make a informed decision.