Maui Wowee

[Joe Hillshoist]

I'm not gonna do this for the whole video, just for a couple of things...

From 6 - 6.15 old mate in the LoTR shirt is wondering why the building burned and the trees didn't. The video that follows is of the Canberra fires 20 years ago this year. The worst urban fires in Australia at the time, and possibly still depending on how you measure "worst". It was the first time a fire tornado was confirmed using data. Take particular note of the first 10 seconds and what appears to be a literal rain of fire.. This is known as an ember attack, its the little burning embers that get blown ahead of a fire and can cause spot fires to break out ahead of the main front. Tho usually it requires bigger embers, branches a foot long with dry eucalypt leaves are the worst culprit for driving spot fires in the bush.



But those little embers get everywhere around a house. They can blow in vents, lodge under eaves, roofing material, in gutters, around air conditioning units etc etc. Once there they will sit and radiate heat and if there is flammable material next to them they can cause fire.

There are points in that video where houses and fences are beginning to ignite while the trees around them remain undamaged from the embers. Because the live trees still have moisture, its harder for those little things to ignite the trees. Also because of the bark and leaves and the shape of the trees. Building codes in Australia change after every major fire because of ember attack on houses. It will end up that houses are required to be smooth boxes with no change in the smoothness of the surface and every outside surface is either glass or rendered concrete eventually cos that's how insidious those little fuckers can be. They can get in everywhere.

I've just wasted 15 minutes doing that one little 15 seconds of video so fuck it.

if there are spoecific things they say that you think are accurate mention them with a time stamp and I'll tell you what i think about them.

If you're interested in learning that is. If you just want to reinforce some fantasy about space lasers then I dunno ... don't bother I spose.

[Joe Hillshoist]

For the next two minutes they show pictures of burned trees and proceed to say they aren't burned.

I'll take photos from a fire around the corner from here that happened on monday last week showing exactly the same thing. This was a ground fire underneath the trees. Tho it got hot and high flame in places it didn't crown properly. It looks very similar to the stuff old mate Gollum is saying is unburnt trees or cooked from the inside or whatever.

I hope these people believe what they're saying cos if they're spouting this rubbish to make a buck off the back of the fire they're no different to the scum trying to move in on the land at Lahaina.

[Harvey]

This is good stuff Joe and helps us triangulate more accurately with regard to Wombats contribution up thread.

[Grizzly]

This guy is really irritating.

So I assume you dismissed everything he said and shared and presented as evidence. And didn't bother to watch. Cause you fucking know it all!

[DrEvil]

I for one am shocked that someone with years of experience in fighting wildfires claims to know something about wildfires and how they behave. The nerve!

[Joe Hillshoist]

This guy is really irritating.

So I assume you dismissed everything he said and shared and presented as evidence. And didn't bother to watch. Cause you fucking know it all!

Look you can believe what you want but I watched 15 minutes of flat out bullshit and stopped. If there is anything he specifically said that is different give me a time stamp and I'll watch it and give you my opinion and you can make up your own mind.

[Joe Hillshoist]

I have never seen an avocado, camphor laurel or eucalypt since he mentioned it, burn from a cigarette lighter. Seen plenty not burn with fire underneath them even if it kills off the leaves and they die a day or two later.

In fact that sucks because then they become a fire hazard next time, which could be a week later.) You'll see this when I figure out somewhere to stick these photos I took this morning of the fire site I mentioned, its opposite where my kids get on the school bus so i'll strip any meta data from them and then post them on some free file sharing site if anyone has one (I don't do facebook or any of that rubbish, never have so I have no idea where to upload photos online these days. I don't normally do it.)

At 14.30 he's showing a tree burned from the inside. i think its a blue gum (which could be one of several species of smooth bark gums) again this is not unusual. These trees have cracks and hollows in them and there is dead wood. if its hot enough for long enough from a ground fire they'll catch (and you can see the burnt ground around that tree) and burn up the middle. Sometimes they'll send sparks out the top, it looks spectacular at night but its dangerous, especially along a fire break or control line.

The tree can fall across control lines and start a fire in unburnt ground or send sparks and embers across the control line/fire break. For this reason we drop those trees. usually in serious fires we have big Dozers D7-9 and we tag trees that are a risk of this and the dozers come along and push them over into the side of the control line that will burn. It suck cos many of these trees are hundreds of years old, I hate doing it but not doing it means the fire can jump the line and then more trees, critters and potentially people die.

How the fuck does this guy say he's never seen a cavity in a euke before? We dropped a 40m tree on my neighbours place the other day, one of the many species of "blue" gum. Took three days to do it safely, next to his house, with harnesses, using an excavator modified to pull on limbs as we cut them etc etc. It was riddled with hollows. The poor thing had a trunk 2m wide at least. Again it was a horrible thing to do to a magnificent tree but it was poised to drop branches on his house. We call those trees widowmakers for a reason in this country.

Anyway, notice he says "burned from the inside out" ... he's talkking about surface scorching. There are photos he is showing where the wood has been cut and the wood inside the tree is not burned. Its yellow or light coloured. The charring is on the surface only. If it was some DEW, and I have no idea how they work but surely the make the entire area hot, I would think it would do more than just char the outside a little bit.

Meanwhile, time and again he says "no combustible materials on the ground". Well no shit... the ground is black and charred. They've been burned away. JFC. Don't give these people any of your money.

"Water activate electronically..." yeah mate, steam burns don't cause charring. Charring needs O2 and cooler burning.

Remeber earlier they're talking about white ash on homes, where is the black stuff? That's cos white ash is more completely burned than black ash. If you have a paddock and you want to burn it do it slowly, light at the top in one spot and let it burn coolly down the hill. You'll get lots of char (and more carbon kept in the char which means it goes back into the soil and not only mitigates climate change, provides structure and food for soil biota). Light it from the bottom and watch it roar up the hill and you'll have white ash, a much quicker burn, higher heat, the soil life won't have as much food and in many cases the flash of the heat will kill the soil life down to 3 or 4 inches.

Then you'll get weeds invading your paddock and lose your pasture.

In bad wildfires the soil can be burned several metres. this happened at Kinglake in 2009 (Black Saturday) and at times during the summer of 2019/20.

[Joe Hillshoist]

So yeah I assume a DEW would cause more than just a bit of black ash on the surface of a tree (even if that "surafce" is inside a tree because its got hollows and crack etc etc.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Then he mentions a Monterey Cypress and says nothing is on fire anywhere around it.

You can see smoke in the fucken picture right next to it!!!

Bottom left of the picture.

Also the surface is charred again but the inside is not. You can see the yellow wood where it looks like the lower limbs have been lopped.

At this point I have Ministry's TV Song running thru my head.

The mulberry tree and the cottonwood are in the middle of burnt ground and he's saying there is nothing on fire anywhere around it.

The tyre ... tyres don't melt, they burn, for ages if they catch - remember the springfield tyre fire on the Simpsons. Its a picture of a tyre sitting on dry grass that has burned at a low temperature (its black, not white ash) so ... anyone ever done a burn out in your car? Smoked the wheels up or seen someone else do it. Gets pretty hot before and still the tyre doesn't burn, just melts a little rubber onto the bitumen. It gets alot hotter than a three inch high grass fire crawling along at 50 - 100 metres per hour. There are dry leaves still inside the tyre and the ground is burnt. So to the obvious conclusion (to me anyway) is the fire wasn't even hot enough to ignite the dry leaves in the tyre.

There are dry leaves around it too but most likely they fell from trees where the fire had scorched the tree and they wilted and died over a few days, like I mentioned upthread with the fire down the road and in the photos this guy showed early in the vid. Notice how the ground is bare in patches too. mimimal fire activity, probably cos it was dry and there wasn't much ground veg/grass.

Bloody hell now there's a melted tyre. Look at the ground around it and make up your own mind based on what I've already said about how hot things get and the different sorts of ash there are.

Jesus. The reason you never see a partial burned tyre is once the tyre it doesn't go out.

Fences now - @Nothing goes like that@ well actually all fence posts burn like that. If they start burning then its usually in the holes you drill for wire, or nail spots etc, because those points always allow O2. Remember at the start of the vid they said about the only truthful thing they've said in the whole vid - fires need fuel heat and Oxygen to burn. A hole that is there to pass wire thru allows oxygen thru as well, just like the hollows in a tree allow oxygen in.

Maybe I should go down the road and take photos of the fence posts as well cos alot of them look very similar to this.

But that's unheard of too ... JFC. I've wasted a couple of hours of my life on this and we're a third of the way thru the vid.

Honestly tho its not wasted if you lot read this, check out what I'm saying (to make sure its legit) then make up your own minds.

Embers don't burn fence posts btw, for the same reason they don't burn tree trunks (unless they land in in a pile of dead bark and leaves under the tree or in the branches). If you look at alot of those fence posts the ground is burnt underneath them. In one of those photos it looks like the fence wire had been tied around a previously burned fence, think it was the Nevada one "where they gamble"...

Admittedly some of those things look a bit odd but again that happens. Sometimes fences and cattle yards burn in odd spots but not everywhere so there is wood burned next to other bits that aren't. I've seen it heaps and none of those fires involved dew, usually they involved a burn off that got away from the landholder.

There is nothing here that I look at and go "wow, that's weird".

You can make what you want of that Grizz but I'm not lying to you.

[DrEvil]

Still not sure where people get the (frankly idiotic) notion that directed energy weapons were used. I mean, you can strap a laser to a plane and then stay on target long enough for a small spot on one tree to catch, or you can send someone with matches. DEW's are wildly overkill for something like this, not to mention that aircraft buzzing the forest repeatedly is a Hell of a lot easier to notice and film than one anonymous tourist in hiking gear.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Okay i've got to the bit where he's talking about replacing culverts with concrete culverts and ... the only thing I can think to ask is why weren't they concrete to begin with? What does this even have to do with anything?

In Australia in a serious fire its expected you could see temps of 1600C - thats 3000F and this guy is claiming fires won't get much above 300F.

I'm half an hour thru this vid and its just driving me batty.

When cars burn the windshields melt. Happens every time. Cars burn at first because even a small ground fire can melt a fuel line and then the fuel is exposed to fire. Then all the flammable material that is in the car ignites, all the soft plastics in the interior etc. Must be space lasers...


Example of I and H beams melting - Kyogle Norply fire in 2005. There are one or two images online if you want to search them up. I know its controversial to say this here but seeing the aftermath of that fire was one of the things that convinced me that the collapse of the Twin Towers based on the support beams melting was legit. Those beams at Norply looked like crazy straws. They lost all structural integrity early in the fire.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Still not sure where people get the (frankly idiotic) notion that directed energy weapons were used. I mean, you can strap a laser to a plane and then stay on target long enough for a small spot on one tree to catch, or you can send someone with matches. DEW's are wildly overkill for something like this, not to mention that aircraft buzzing the forest repeatedly is a Hell of a lot easier to notice and film than one anonymous tourist in hiking gear.

Exactly.

Anyway...

I decided to sus out this Peggy Hall and her Natural Americaness.

She's a bloody fundy preacher. As far as I'm concerned probably the least trustworthy people on earth. Even worse than politicians and journos. Their entire business model is fleecing people who are scared of death.

[Joe Hillshoist]

One of the things I've heard about the siren failure is that people resposnible said the whole thing ahppenmed so quickly that they didn't have time to even think about it. That the whole situation unfolded so quickly they were too busy trying to figure out what was happening and organise an immediate response.

It may be a reasonable excuse to be honest.

The footage i've seen from inside Lahaina as people tried to escape is fucken scary. The wind is so strong. The fire would have moved so fast...

IN 2009 the fire travelled at 120km/hr it covered 30km in 15 minutes and thats as the crow flies, it was thru hilly country so more than 30km of actual ground surface - faster than the wind cos once it got hot enough it created its own wind to further drive the fire. This happens regularly, its not unusual at all. the heat pushes the air in front of the fire and sucks in air behind it creating a feedback loop.

The winds in Hawaii were at least as intense as those winds in Victoria, probably more intense.

How far did the fire travel?

It looks like its less than 5km from the mountains to the coast.

That means the fire could have covered that are in minutes. Probably less than 15 minutes from one end to the other.

So maybe there just wasn't time. Fuck that's scary.

[stickdog99]

Still not sure where people get the (frankly idiotic) notion that directed energy weapons were used. I mean, you can strap a laser to a plane and then stay on target long enough for a small spot on one tree to catch, or you can send someone with matches. DEW's are wildly overkill for something like this, not to mention that aircraft buzzing the forest repeatedly is a Hell of a lot easier to notice and film than one anonymous tourist in hiking gear.

I assume that they have set many fires with DEWs just to test if see if they could do so.

I mean we are talking about the people who did this.



So tell me, would you put simple arson past these people?

[DrEvil]

Of course not, but why does it absolutely have to be with lasers?