The RFS Eco-Holocaust of 2019
Friday, December 20th, 2019
Welcome to the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. Won’t you enjoy your stay?
An immense evil has been perpetrated upon the remnant ecology of New South Wales.
Natural forests set aside as national parks and world heritage have been allowed to incinerate on a broad scale not seen before in Australian history. The Blue Mountains World Heritage Area has been destroyed.
An tourist campfire unextinguished at the over-popular Ruined Castle Campsite was allowed to burn for days before any government response from custodian NSW National Parks. So now a third of the precious Jamison Valley has gone along.
In the northern part of the Blue Mountains World Heritage, the massive celebrated expanse of the wild and rugged Wollemi National Park (5000 square km, or in firie terms 500,00 hectares) a fire that started in late October 2019 on a rural property off Army Road near Gospers Mountain was left to burn for weeks without emergency response. It was another negligent burn off. On 9th November, the RFS (Rural Fire Starters) rated it’s risk obscurely as ‘Advice’, whatever that means, and reported that it was “being controlled” – famous last words by this mob.
As at 20th December, the fire has been allowed to effectively wipe out the entire Wollemi National Park east to west, Yengo National Park, and spread south into the adjoining Blue Mountains National Park and now it’s in the Grose Valley. It is blackened, still and utterly dead.
The Jurassic period’s Wollemi Pine discovered by chance in 1994 in a remote patch of the Wollemi by Parks Service officer David Noble was reviewed by the NSW Scientific Committee after the International Union for the Conservation of Nature listed it as critical, with fewer than 100 mature individual trees in the wild. The NSW committee recommended the highest level of endangered status because it is so susceptible to Phytophthera cinnamomi, a pathogen which causes dieback of branches and stems. But that was not it’s obvious threat. It was the RFS.
Endangered Wollemi Pine endemic cluster – now incinerated by NPWS and RFS management negligence.
The total World Heritage Area destroyed by this particular bushfire is 720,000 hectares, more than half the size of greater Sydney (comprising multiple fires that have been allowed to all link up into one massive fire ground – Gospers Mountain fire 445000 ha, Kerry Ridge 93000 ha, Little L Complex 92000 ha, Three Mile 45000, Crumps Complex 6000 ha, Paddock Run 29000 ha, Owendale 4000 ha and Mount Victoria 2ooo ha.
The Mount Victoria fire has since been renamed the Grose Valley Fire with ominous implications of what the RFS intends with that one. Even the Goulburn River National Park has been targeted (Meads Creek West Fire 14000 ha) and that will no doubt combine with the others.
Coupled with The State Mine Fire of 2013 started by Army ordnance outside Lithgow on a Total fire Ban day which ripped through the Wollemi National Park in 2013, this year’s effort means there is nothing left of Wollemi National Park pretty much from Baerami Creek 100km south to the Wollangambe River and beyond.
This fire front is currently threatening to link up with another massive blaze that started in the Kanangra-Boyd National Park in the southern Blue Mountains around 26th November. Left to burn it has destroyed most of the national park and the water catchment.
To the south of New South Wales a bushfire allowed to incinerate 220,000 ha of “protected” habitat and wildlife from outside Nowra to Batemans Bay. The firie command dubbed it the ‘Currowan Fire‘. More slaughter.
To the north of News South Wales, two more massive fire grounds, each of comparable size to the above have wiped out more than 2 million hectares of native habitat that is supposed to be ‘protected’ in national parks.
Regional extinctions will be across multiple species of rare and endangered fauna. Across the New South Wales eastern seaboard an area the size of Tasmania has gone. Thousands of koalas have perished.
This is a mass extinction event, human caused alright. This is a war crime against ecology. No wonder the RFS has initiated a media blackout.
“I love a fire burnt country… bigs me head and pays me wages, see.”
The frequency, ferocity and scale of these bushfire emergencies is well beyond a volunteer Dad’s Army limited by a dated Baby Boomer culture of responsive “protecting life and property” that demonises and antropocentrically dismisses Australia’s remnant and disappearing ecology as ‘vermin’, a ‘hazard’, and ‘fuel’.
The RFS is an abject failure and the government’s use and abuse of its century old volunteer firefighting model has again proven incapable and useless at putting our bushfires in time to save ecology, infrastructure, livestock homes and lives. Volunteer fire-fighting subsists only to save goverment money so that politicians when in power can redirect the savings of not paying firefighters away from local communities.
The Federal delegation of emergency management, not just that concerning bushfires, is beyond state and territory resources to adequately prepare, respond and extinguish with the military precision demanded for such emergencies. Australian rural communities each summer witness government overdependence upon an historic volunteer culture that fails rural Australia time and again every summer. Invariably the emergency overwhelms the Dad’s Army and interstate and overseas crews and resources are brought in – usually too little to late. This national dependency is reciprocated interstate.
PM Scott Morrison’s Boomer regurgitation of perpetuating the “spirit of volunteers” is a time old abuse of ordinary rural Australians trying to do their bit for their local community. It’s callous government paying lip service thanks with no payment or compensation more than a cheap slap on the back for the media, a sausage from the volunteer sizzle and another hollow pet talk.
Crocodile Tears Culture
Australia’s Prime Minister was publicly ressured last week to return from his Christmas holiday in Hawaii to show some degree of leadership in the wake of New South Wales declared bushfire state of emergency. The nation’s Hume Freeway between Melbourne and Sydney was closed because of the mega bushfire that had ignited weeks prior many kilometres deep in the wild Blue Mountains Kanangra-Boyd National Park, and so left by authorities to hazard reduce itself until it arrived uncontrolled to cut the Hume Freeway.
Too little to late yet again. Government is culpable for the ecological holocaust, the 3000+ Koalas burned alive, the utter destruction of World Heritage and ‘protected‘ national parks, the human lives lost, the family homes gone forever, livestock perished, business revenue lost, regional economic losses, and a massive polluting contribution to worsen global greenhouse gases.
Extinction Rebellion need to redirect their targeting of offenders to NSW RFS Headquarters at 4 Murray Rose Avenue, Sydney Olympic Park and to every petrol despatch unit branch.
