On Feb 12, 9:17*pm, "John Varigos"
wrote:
Thanks for your thoughts Ted. *Our politicians have been talking about a
North-South water pipeline to bring water from the monsoonal north to the
drought stricken south for more than 100 years. *If they had started back
then it would have been finished by now.

Now, had it been an oil pipeline that was required ......!!

One can live without oil, but one can not live without water! And
business can't thrive if there's no-one to hire to do the work or buy
their product/service.

I guess the politicians there are as useless as those here.

Maybe someone needs to rattle their cages and demand that they get it
done. I would hold them, and their predecessors, guilty of negligent
homicide in the deaths of everyone who has died as a result of either
the floods in the north or the fires in the south.

A combination of water pipelines, with appropriate water management,
and creative landscaping ought to minimize risk of wild fire at least
in urban centres, and around homes in rural areas.

There are wildly different kinds of plants growing in each area. For
example, in the Canadian boreal forest, there is no such thing as a
truly old growth forest. The forest NEEDS fire to replenish itself,
and many boreal tree species can not reproduce unless fire burns the
resin of their cones so they can open. And some of these species have
bark that is loaded with resin, and they burn magnificently. But
there are species that, if sufficiently mature, will suffer only
trivial scarring, surviving most fires well, and there are some
species that can be described as reluctant burners: stands of these
are sometimes referred to as asbestos forests. It isn't that they
won't burn, but rather that wildfires tend not to propagate through
them very well. All of these live in the same general environment:
the Canadian boreal forest.

As for water management, lessons can be learned from beavers. When
they were thriving through north america, including the arid southwest
of Alberta (I guess that would be in the foothills, primarily, as they
need access to streams and trees, those sites with the largest
concentration of beaver always had plenty of surface potable water
even in the worst of droughts.

It isn't likely that any of these Canadian species could survive down
under, but understanding their ecology here, and the hydrology of
ecosystems containing lots of beaver, could aide in designing useful
water management systems, and identifying native plants that could
provide something of a buffer between homes and areas prone to
wildfire.

I can only hope the final death toll is no worse than what we've
heard, and that once the shock of the tragedy has subsided, all the
people there start taking their politicians to task, demanding that
they finally do something useful to minimize the chances of such
tragedies occuring again.

Cheers,

Ted