Posted on 12/26/2015 12:52:42 AM PST by Berlin_Freeper
..."They (residents) were all prepared, putting their barbecues on, they were cooking away, and all of a sudden they could see the smoke coming over the hill," local resident Patrick Carey said.
"They thought it was still four hours away according to what they'd heard. And then all of a sudden it was an hour away, and all of a sudden it was half-an-hour away. So, they just dropped everything, stopped cooking and hopped in their car."
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Akbars?
It’s not impossible, but we have plenty of home grown nutcases who do this every year. It’s an incredible problem. There are tens of thousands of bushfires in Australia a year and as many as half of them are suspicious - and at least ten percent are clearly deliberately lit.
There’s some weirdness in the way some people are wired that makes them prone to doing this, and they are very hard to catch or stop.
A major problem is the eucalyptus trees, that can defeat fire breaks. In a forest fire, they are full of highly pressurized, very flammable oil. When they explode, they blow this flaming oil in all directions, some of it landing a long distance away.
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