Victorian Bushfire "celebrity" Sam the Koala dies http://comicpaintbookhumour.blogspot.com/2009/08/victorian-bushfire-celebrity-sam-koala.html Bushfires are different from_______(control) burning. Indigenous communities ______(use) fire as a hunting and farming tool to assist with regeneration. Indigenous Australians used controlled burning and fire management to________(encourage) the growth of new plants and to prevent the growth of long grass which contributes to the tinder or fuel for bushfires.
Fire management also allowed animals to escape, although some _____(lose) to hunters. Eucalypts, for example, require occasional burns to regenerate. Fire stick farming ___(use) over tens of thousands of years created the fertile grazing plains west of the Blue Mountains. Long periods of dry, hot weather and natural vegetation that___(burn) easily ____(make) Australia particularly vulnerable to bushfire.
Australian bushfires can be particularly severe as eucalyptus trees contain large amounts of oil which can ___(burn) very fast and very hot. Other human management factors which have contributed to the severity of bushfires include high fuel loads, a change from fire prevention to fire fighting measures and not building adequate buffer zones to protect built assets. As Australians learn to understand more about bushfires, bushfire prevention strategies are___ (adopt).
The Ash Wednesday bushfires, 1983
In the summer of 1983, conditions in Victoria and South Australia contributed to extremely high ignition levels. Drought conditions with a heatwave with temperatures of 43 degrees Celsius meant that forests were highly combustible. On Wednesday 16 February (now known as 'Ash Wednesday'), around 180 bushfires were burning across both states, the largest of them starting in Victoria. Of significance was that out of the Ash Wednesday fires Victorian rescue teams ____ _____(reorganize) to better fight future fires, through improved radio networks, single command