Arson Seen in Australia Bushfires, Bad Season Ahead
Date: 26-Sep-06
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: Paul Tait
About 50 separate fires, fanned by winds of up to 110 kph (66 mph), burned around Sydney on a blistering hot day on Sunday, signalling an early start to the annual bushfire season in Australia's parched eastern states.
Meteorologists worried that Australia's bushfire seasons were beginning earlier and lasting longer at a time when 90 percent of New South Wales state was drought-affected, and that Australia had just recorded its hottest and driest August on record.
"We've got to get a greater understanding on this, on the frequency of fires, the earlier start to the season and if there's any connection to climate change," Kevin O'Loughlin of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
"You would have to be concerned that this could be a bad fire season," he said.
Fire crews mopped up fires burning north, south and west of Sydney, Australia's largest city, and conducted preventative back-burning operations in cooler weather on Monday, while authorities investigated how the blazes started.
"Some of the fires at least, through the process of elimination, we suspect very strongly were the consequence of acts of arson," New South Wales Rural Fire Service Commissioner Phil Koperberg told reporters.
He said investigators had found that one blaze north of Sydney had eight separate ignition points, indicating arson.
Australia has suffered at least three serious bushfire outbreaks in the past five years, gutting more than 530 homes in the capital Canberra, killing nine people in South Australia state and destroying an area nearly three times the size of Britain.
Residents were astonished by the speed with which fires claimed houses. Ian Cooper said he had no chance to save the house of his neighbours, who are on holidays overseas, at Cattai on Sydney's northwestern fringe.
"The house went up really very quickly, you couldn't get in there to get anything," Ian Cooper told Australian television.
Bushfires occur naturally in Australia but criminologists estimate that up to half of them could be deliberately lit. Those figures are even higher near urban areas.
While many fires started by children or vandals are quickly brought under control, serial arsonists light fewer fires but those fires cause much more damage.
"At least some of the people who light them don't have a good appreciation of the amount of damage that can be done and that's probably especially true for young people who might light a fire for reasons of boredom or excitement or to get attention," Australian Institute of Criminology research analyst Damon Muller told Reuters.
Links have also been established between arson and violent behaviour or cruelty to animals.
"A serial arsonist is someone who gets a specific sort of excitement out of lighting a fire. The chances are that there's probably not a lot of those sorts of people but they do an inordinate amount of damage," Muller said.