Found this on NAR and had to share it.
Bizarre, California, Great Stuff, Phone, USA, Utility Company | Working | December 28, 2019
(My family lives in a part of California that has been subjected to power shutoffs by our power company, in the name of safety concerns. Before the most recent shutoff, my daughter receives this phone alert:)
Alert: “Hello, this is [Huge Power Company] with an important message… Goodbye.” click
(A bit ominous, no?)
Oh, there have been scams galore coming from people saying they’re from PG&E. I just hang up on them. I’m pretty sure that 1: PG&E wouldn’t be calling me, and 2: They wouldn’t be calling from a spoofed number.
The Oz fires are still going.
Current estimates say they won’t go out until they either burn everything that’s flammable or we get weeks of rain. The latter isn’t due for months (and we’ve been in a drought for most of the last umpteen years, so we may not even get that).
To make matters worse, the scammers are in on the act and trying to take advantage of the situation and create fake relief donation sites.
The numbers of hectares / acres / square light-seconds burnt are now so large as to be meaningless. Same with the number of both domestic and wild animals killed, and the destruction of some unique wilderness.
On the good side, all the people reported missing have been located safe and sound.
I saw something the other day that they arrested some old man for setting brushfires a couple days ago, that sort of shit can’t be helping.
It looks like these are still small compared to the fires in the 70’s, is the geographic area worse for this damage or are there just more people around now?
I’m worried about all the tech architecture.
Yes, I have concerns about the LAN down under.
Yeah that was down in my area. I respect my elders and all, but not when they pull that crap.
Holy crap. So much for it being just one dude. Over 20 arrested since November for intentionally lighting fires.
WTF? Why would you intentionally make a bad problem even worse?
Probably trying to start a counter-fire and hope that it will prevent said fire from burning your stuff.
Counter-fires need careful planning and need to be lit at the right place at the right time…
I was thinking that as well, but also hearing “people who want to extend school closures” and “people who want to put out the fire they set (and be lauded as a hero” as well. Not sure which options are true.
Maybe they should leave that to the firefighters.
Also assholes who want to see the world burn, literally. Apparently an awful lot of the really serious fires are set by people, usually in hard to get areas so it’s difficult to catch them early because no one is there.
There may have been alleged 200[*] arsonists caught, but the vast majority (~95%) of the fires were caused by dry lightning.
There’s been a lot of mis-information pushed by various ‘press’ and ‘media’ sources (looking at you, Rupert Murdoch) in an attempt to deflect blame from the PM and his abysmal handling of the entire disaster.
[*] - I’m not saying there weren’t fires started deliberately, far from it. If the authorities catch the scum who did light fires, then a suitable punishment would be to put the arsonists in the front lines of the firefighters and let them see (and feel) the consequences of their actions.
I heard something where it was something like 200 fire related crimes which is a lot broader net and presumable includes people doing stupid things like not listening to emergency services, storing their oily rags and fireworks together in the shed out in the flammable fields, etc.
Out of the 200ish about 24 were arrested for deliberately starting usually more than one fire.
Again though, what’s the major difference between these fires and the even bigger ones in the 70’s? How are these much worse? Is it the location or population pressure that did it?
For some reason this made me think of population control and then indirecly of this Star Trek TNG episode : A Taste of Armageddon - Wikipedia
I suspect they wish it was the other way around - buildings can be (fairly) easily replaced. Vines are a lot harder, especially if they were old ones.
Yeah, vines take a long while to grow and produce good fruit, sadly.
Weed (not the puffpuffpass variety) will grow like crazy.
Also that variety, but it takes a bit more tending. Maybe this would be a good replacement crop for the entire continent.
I don’t know about the fires in the 70s - a bit before my time. Although I remember the 1983 ‘Ash Wednesday’ fires, and the 2009 ‘Black Saturday’ fires.
These fires now are orders of magnitude worse. Far fewer lives lost than 2009, thanks to better evacuation warnings and communications. The fires are still going, although they are slowly burning out or being brought under control. The biggest problem is the terrain in far-east Victoria - it’s so rugged with so little access that all they can do is let the fires burn themselves out.
As to the other factor as to why they are so bad - the drought. Everything has been bone-dry for years and it doesn’t take much to get a fire going.
There was a report in 2008 which (to paraphrase) said that if climate change continued unabated, we would be seeing a fire season that started earlier, finished later, with fires larger than previously seen, and we would see evidence by 2020. It’s now 2020 and we’ve seen two of those three.
So yeah, get pissed at me if you want, but climate change is here. It is real, and us humans are directly causing it with our fossil-fuel powered world. (Having 7.5 billion people on this rock is not helping at all, either.)