Perth on the brink of flames

In 2019-2020 on the East coast of Australia, the fires caused the direct death of 34 people and the indirect death, by inhalation of smoke, of another 445 people, destroyed 186,000 km², an area greater than that of England (130,279 Km²) and caused the death of three billion terrestrial vertebrates and an enormous number of other living beings. At the end of January 2021 it is the turn of the Western part of Australia, on the outskirts of Perth, where as of today, February 3, the fires have already caused the destruction of 59 houses but Premier Mark McGowen reassures those in quarantine for the covid-19 that if the fire approaches their residence, they do not have the duty to respect the isolation and can save themselves… and thank goodness it has also informed the population of the arrival of reinforcements: a firefighting plane from NSW. The population must also probably feel reassured by the fact that usually in Perth, when the going gets tough, they pull a truck from the 1930s and another one from the 1960s out of the fire museum. The 1125 professional firefighters of Western Australia, a State that covers about a third of Australia, must also feel reassured, when the 250 of them who worked in a heat that touched 37 ° to stop the fires, had the result during the night between February the 1st and February the 2nd that the wall of fire has gone from a length of 35 km to 70 km but the news reports reassure us that there are half a dozen fire fighting helicopters at work. One wonders if the lockdown in which the population of Perth finds itself due to a single case of covid-19 of the English variant, is not a coincidence but above all one wonders, as the opposition leader Antony Albanese explained, if the billion dollars that liberals spent from 2013 to January 2021 on advertising are money well spent. Should the fires suddenly arrive in the densely populated parts of Perth, as indeed in any other Australian city, where there is not only vegetation but also gas pipes, petrol stations, countless cars etc. that could make the flames flare up exponentially, how are they going to stop the flames if they can't in the countryside or the suburbs? Where is the wisdom of a political class when, after the irreparable disaster suffered last summer, it did not multiply the forces available to the firefighters? It takes men, equipment, fire trucks, planes, lots of planes! These are the important things, because they must be able to extinguish a fire immediately in the bud; failing to do so has a huge, devastating, irreparable cost and the citizens don't give a damn about the apologies or the displeasure of the politicians when they then go to visit the affected communities and the relatives of the dead, they are paid with good money to prevent disasters, not to chat.

Matteo Cornelius Sullivan

Source by Matteo Cornelius Sullivan