Randall,
I hate it when my memory goes. Old age, y'know. But I (and history)
still stand by most of the statements I made:
During the 1975 fire season in Oz, the Cobar fire burnt 3.75M acres, the
Balranald
fire burnt over 0.85M acres and the Moolah-Corinya fire burnt over 2.8M
acres. The
latter fire has a front of over 600 miles, and the firestorm edge was
clocked by a helicopter
as moving at 150 mph. Oh, and the Moolah-Corinya started on Ash Wednesday
1975. Oz had not yet adopted the US media style of "naming" news events.
All fires in that single 4 month fire season in Oz incinerated nearly
0.3 BILLION acres, or 15% of the total area of Oz.
The US has no idea of what real fires are like.
Shane Ingate, bad memory but not mistaken, in Maryland
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Randall wrote:
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think you're mistaken.
The name "Ash Wednesday" was coined in 1983, when almost 150 separate fires
broke out in Oz. The fire threatening Herman & Helena's home has already
burned
half again the area of the largest of the Ash Wednesday fires, 160,000 acres
vs
105,000.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/W/WILDFIRES
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22ash+wednesday%22+australia
The largest estimate I found for all the land burned in Oz that entire
summer
was only 1.3 million acres.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_Wednesday_bushfires
Which is still a lot, but comparable to 2003 here in CA (approx 900,000
acres
burned). And less than the 1.5 million acres burned in Yellowstone in 1988.
Not to mention Alaska 2004 when a single fire destroyed 1.3 million acres.
(Total wildfire damage in Alaska that season was over 6 million acres.)
I guess we must have global warming under control, since the largest
wildfires
in the US were over 100 years ago ... 3 million acres burned in Maine in
1825;
another 3 million in S. Carolina in 1898; 3.8 million in Wisconsin &
Michigan
1871; 2.5 million Michigan 1881; etc.
http://www.nifc.gov/stats/historicalstats.html
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