Bushfire
Ministerial Meandering
Bushfire
Blackened, emaciated, blistered and tottering, the sentinel army tilts and stumbles over its fallen comrades, gently smoking and some still oozing life-sap into the ground.
The battle is done for them, and no-one to mourn. Even the moose and bear can no longer find shelter here, nor the wolf stalk the white-tailed deer.
Only the Great Spirit knows how it started; perhaps a lightning strike, perhaps a moment’s thoughtlessness - but a lethal spark flew, and with it - thousands of hectares of life-rich forest
Older wounds can be seen along the road; injuries from the past scar the landscape with regiments of whitened ghosts, completed by midnight witches’ caps like asparagus tips - all that is left of once shady branches.
In Africa, such burns are usually deliberate, and clear the mealie or sugar fields of unwelcome guests before harvest. The move always does someone good. The snakes and smaller creatures that run before the blaze are spotted from above by the yellow-tailed kites who will soon have an abundance of food. The bush pigs will have found safer pastures already.
Following the passage of the fire, the zebra and wilderbeest will return first to feast on the minerals left in the ashes.
But this is not Africa, and the uncontrolled fires in British Columbia leave charred crucibles of communities seeking refuge.
Why do we pay this annual fee to nature, when with thought and intelligence much of it might be avoided? It seems that it was not so in the thousands of years before the settlers arrived - with their carelessness, opinions, and ‘better’ ways of opening up a country that was doing just fine before they came. But that is the colonial European - he knows better; no - he knows all!
Absurdly, the knowledge of fire-fighting is also one of those skills that has not advanced much since the frantic chain of water-buckets from the lake. A retired (and skilled) fire expert I know has written papers on the application of Poiseille’s Law to the problem. An increase of the radius of the fire hose by 50% will increase the flow in the pipe by over 5 times. If you double the radius, you increase the flow by 16 times - assuming the pressure stays the same.
Imagine what a difference that would make on stopping the spread of fires!
But my friend is not listened to; I have sent his paper to the MLA, and asked our Bishop (now Archbishop) to raise it in the Assembly…nothing happens…so we continue to watch our province burn year by year, at immense cost in emotional suffering, physical suffering - and financial suffering to all. Is it so difficult to make the hoses wider?
So for now, the tourists who come to visit our province will continue to see thousands of kilometres of ghost-like forest, charred and stinking, often because of stupidity, and neglect of common sense. And our fire-fighters will have to continue to risk their lives using out-dated and inadequate equipment for the sake of a minor modification. Is this something else we are expected to now regard as ‘normal’ - like global warming?
I imagine Jesus pulling at his hair, and saying to his disciples, “Why are you still so slow to understand?”
Philip+