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Eh, I think they’re more than “a bit of a pain” in Australia. Bushfire season always kills a few people every year, but it’s only because of us taking fires ver

by fwlr 4y ago

Eh, I think they’re more than “a bit of a pain” in Australia. Bushfire season always kills a few people every year, but it’s only because of us taking fires very seriously and having defense in depth and early evacuation protocols that it doesn’t kill way more. There are cases like 2009 where more than 170 people died, which still may not sound like much for a population of 20 million, but it was mostly in the Kinglake and Marysville areas (roughly 100 deaths out of the area’s population of several thousand). It is a very grave risk with very serious mitigation efforts that largely work. If fire management and response were to break down even a little bit, though, the number of deaths will skyrocket. XPRIZE success on wildfires will be deeply appreciated here.

jpgvm 4y ago
Yeah I grew up in rural Australia. I get why it would be useful. Just travelling opened my eyes to much bigger fire problems is all. The pollution caused by slash and burn is estimated to cause ~11k deaths a year in Thailand alone, I imagine the numbers are much worse in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. I'm not saying I don't appreciate improvements in detecting and maybe preventing bush fires just trying to raise awareness of a larger more dangerous issue in the world that gets little to no attention because it's outside of Western media sphere.
- fwlr 4y ago
  I am a bit wary of arguments from pollution or other indirect deaths due to fire. (I do accept them, but I am still wary.) For example, the 2019-20 bushfire season is cited as 33 direct and 417 indirect deaths. Direct deaths vary mostly with fire detection, response, and evacuation. Indirect deaths vary mostly with fire volume and wind patterns (19-20 killed so many because the weather abnormally pushed pollution into heavily populated areas, and kept it there for an abnormally long time). It seems hard to control fire volume (and really hard to control weather patterns), while it seems easy to control detection, response, and evacuation. I do take your point that it seems easy to control fire volume specifically for slash-and-burn agriculture in South East Asia, as those are mostly artificially created fires and we could stop them from doing that.

by fwlr 4y ago

jpgvm 4y ago

Yeah I grew up in rural Australia. I get why it would be useful. Just travelling opened my eyes to much bigger fire problems is all. The pollution caused by slash and burn is estimated to cause ~11k deaths a year in Thailand alone, I imagine the numbers are much worse in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. I'm not saying I don't appreciate improvements in detecting and maybe preventing bush fires just trying to raise awareness of a larger more dangerous issue in the world that gets little to no attention because it's outside of Western media sphere.

fwlr 4y ago
I am a bit wary of arguments from pollution or other indirect deaths due to fire. (I do accept them, but I am still wary.) For example, the 2019-20 bushfire season is cited as 33 direct and 417 indirect deaths. Direct deaths vary mostly with fire detection, response, and evacuation. Indirect deaths vary mostly with fire volume and wind patterns (19-20 killed so many because the weather abnormally pushed pollution into heavily populated areas, and kept it there for an abnormally long time). It seems hard to control fire volume (and really hard to control weather patterns), while it seems easy to control detection, response, and evacuation. I do take your point that it seems easy to control fire volume specifically for slash-and-burn agriculture in South East Asia, as those are mostly artificially created fires and we could stop them from doing that.