Week 12 – Audio Lesson: Listen & Read

Refer to lesson PDF for transcript with highlighted vocabulary (download here).

Pete: This week we were going to try and come up with a few stories, but there doesn’t really seem to be much else.

Ian: There’s one story at the moment.

Pete: Yeah. And so, I guess, we’re going to be talking about the bushfire crisis in Australia the moment. So, I guess, to give a bit of background to people, it started in… What…? I’ve got some notes here. September last year.

 Ian: Yeah. Yeah. 

Pete: About the end of spring, right? 2019.

Ian: September in southeast Queensland, Northern New South Wales. 

Pete: Yep.

Ian: And it’s just really just following its way south as the summer has kicked in. It’s certainly the earliest that I can remember. There will always be debates, and depending on which side of the political fence you sit, whether they’re defending themselves or the Opposition attacking the Government. The words ‘worst’, ‘hottest’, and so on, will keep coming out. But certainly, in my 60 years of living in Australia, I can’t remember a bushfire season starting in the middle of spring.

Pete: And you’ve lived through obviously quite a few of these like…

Ian: Four or five major bush fire seasons, not just single bad fires, which happen every year, but seasons where we have, you know, millions of hectares that are being burnt out…

Pete: Yep.

Ian: …and people losing lives and significant loss of property and wildlife and livestock and so on.

Pete: So, some of these include Ash Wednesday, which was before I was born. 

Ian: Yeah. Yeah, it was the Ash Wednesday, I was actually on our honeymoon, your mum and I were on our honeymoon.

Pete: Okay. So, I might have been on the way?

Ian: No, you weren’t. You’re a few years after that.

Pete: Yep. True. True.

Ian: And, look, we can talk about that if you… sort of… mental note9 to talk about that because of some interesting stories, just the human-interest type stories that have come out of that and our experience of that.

Pete: ‘Cause I remember growing up always hearing about Ash Wednesday.

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: Obviously, I was there in there. But that that was like, you know, a big thing with… What were the stats11 from Ash Wednesday? Like, a few dozens of people who died.

Ian: Yeah. Dozens of people died.

Pete: Hundreds of houses.

Ian: Yeah. Hundreds of houses. And again, it’s the scale, you know, obviously the personal tragedies, you know, you can’t… If one person dies, it’s a tragedy.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: But… and the loss of, you know, livestock, property, houses, and so on is always tragic. But I think when it starts to be across multiple states…

Pete: Yep.

Ian: Ash Wednesday was South Australia and Victoria.

Pete: Ah, okay.

Ian: And so, you have multiple fire fronts that are just creating this sort of huge balls of smoke that last for weeks.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: Then… and it’s the same now. We had similar in 2009.

Pete: So, that was Black Saturday, right?

Ian: That was Black Saturday. And that was the hottest I have ever remembered. You know, we had the hottest temperature in the world that day in Melbourne. It was 52 degrees in the southwest suburbs of Melbourne, and that’s just unheard of. And it was 1% humidity, so… And that’s the problem that we have with bushfires. Obviously, every year in summer, there are going to be fires because it gets hot and dry. But when you have those extreme temperatures, extreme dryness over a long period of time, it just means you’ve got a huge amount of fuel and all it requires is one spark, whether it’s accidentally lit, deliberately lit, whether it’s come out of, you know, summer storms. You know, dry lightning, as they call it, is a huge cause of bushfires.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: Unfortunately, one of the biggest causes is idiots. People lighting fires either accidentally or deliberately. But….

Pete: Yep. And malfunction with our technology, right?

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: Especially, the electrical grid and… 

Ian: Yeah. Yeah. And there’s been a few cases of that happening. So…

Pete: So, what… How has it changed from when you were growing up. So, you remember there obviously being a bushfire season and every year, you know, there were always bush fires. 

Ian: There’s always bush fires, and then every decade or so, there’s a sort of major conflagration like we have at the moment. But this one is I think it’s really the earliest, because typically our bush fire season was late January through to March…

Pete: Yep.

Ian: …the end of summer.

Pete: Because this summer would’ve dried everything out, right?

Ian: Because it was dry. Whereas we’ve had probably two and a half decades of cyclical drought in south eastern Australia. Not every location has been in drought for 25 years, but you remember what we were like 10 years ago in southern Victoria. We were in drought for 10 years.

Pete: Well, that was when we had water restrictions.

Ian: Yeah, huge water restrictions. 

Pete: I remember not being allowed to wash your cars on certain days at certain times.

Ian: Couldn’t wash your cars. Eventually, where we were living, you couldn’t wash cars at all. You couldn’t wash houses. You couldn’t water the garden…

Pete: Yep.

Ian: …unless you had tank or bore water. You couldn’t use mains water for anything other than just normal household usage or commercial usage if you were in a business. Yeah. So, those sort of things have happened. But when the drought broke where we are, it really just moved north. And so, you know, New South Wales and southern Queensland and parts of South Australia have been in drought for the last 10 years. And we’re talking about, in some places, where it has not rained for ten years. Not… there has been… you know, typically by definition… the usual working definition of a drought Is that less than the annual rainfall, on average annual rainfall, and if you have that in multiple years, it’s considered to be a drought. But we’re talking about no rain, not just less rain. So… 

Pete: So, I’m sure a lot of listeners are going to be thinking, “Why does that happen here in Australia?” Why are there these places where it doesn’t rain for so long?

Ian: Yeah, well, we’re… Yeah, we’re talking about places that in a human time frame as in since Indigenous Australians have been here, so, we’re talking 50,000+ years, those areas have transitioned from being grasslands through to desert, and that desert is expanding as our climate has changed. Over the last 20 or 30 years, though, with these significant droughts, we’re talking about farmland that has traditionally been in, you know, getting rainfall every year and you can grow crops and so on. Sometimes they are in irrigation areas. Sometimes they’re not. But now, we’re getting those places in areas where there’s just no rain. And those places are not in real danger of fire because there’s nothing to burn.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: But what that means in places where there are forests, and traditionally, forests require a fair amount of rainfall. But if you to a place where it hasn’t rained for months over winter, which would typically… our winter/spring would typically be our wettest months in those areas, you’ve got places where it hasn’t rained for months and then it starts to get hot, all of the undergrowth is either dead or dry. And so, all you need is a spark and it goes. And eucalypt forest, which is most of our forests, eucalypt forests, because of the oil in eucalyptus leaves, explode, you know, into flames.

Pete: Yep. And that’s an adaptation, right?

Ian: It is.

Pete: So that they burn quicker…

Ian: They burn quicker, hotter.

Pete: …so the plants don’t die themselves.

Ian: The plants don’t die themselves.

Pete: Usually.

Ian: Usually.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: But when you’re getting… we’re getting temperatures in these fires because of the amount of material that is burning in them that is just beyond that capacity.

Pete: Well, some of the insane stuff, to jump into the human stories in this, was that I’ve seen on the news say cars that had aluminium engines or parts of the engine that were aluminium or the wheels, the hubs on the cars, aluminium…

Ian: Yeah. Magnesium or aluminium. Yeah.

Pete: …just melted onto the ground everywhere.

Ian: Yep. Yep.

Pete: Running down the hill. Looks like a mercury or something.

Ian: Yeah. So, if you’re getting temperatures over a thousand degrees Celsius in these fires…

Pete: Yep.

Ian: …and they’re burning for so long in places because there’s enough fuel for them to burn…

Pete: Yep.

Ian: …it’s not like they just blast through when they’re gone in seconds or minutes. They’re burning for hours. And so, that, yeah, it’s ridiculous the damage that is being done. 

Pete: Well, there was another story of someone, I think, out in East Gippsland who had a kiln, they made pottery and they left the pottery outside of the kiln in order to… before it had been… What’s the word?

Ian: Fired?

Pete: Fired. And then it was naturally fired by the bush fire. So, when they came back, the pottery that was clay, wet clay prior to that…

Ian: They’ve got ceramic pottery.

Pete: …was ceramic. Because of the heat.

Ian: Yeah. I know. I know. It’s crazy. Yeah.

Pete: Just insane. So, some of the stats. I guess, we’ve lost 16 million acres, which is 70… Oh, sorry, almost 65,000 square kilometres, right?

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: Which is sort of the equivalent of the south… southern portion of Great Britain. The size of…

Ian: Two thirds of England. Yeah.

 Pete: So, to put that in context, almost the size of Belgium, I think someone was saying.

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: It was massive. Right? You know, it’s equivalent of… And I remember them talking about…

Ian: It’s as big as about a third of the states in The United States. 

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: The smaller states.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: As big as or bigger than any of those individually. 

Pete: Yeah, it’s insane. And when we were worried about the Amazon burning, that was, I think, now it’s probably about a tenth of what Australia’s lost.

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: What was going on with the Amazon. So, we’ve had probably half a billion animals were likely… 

Ian: And that’s vertebrates.

Pete: Vertebrates. Yeah. Exactly. Not insects or plants.

Ian: Not insects, plants. Yeah, so…

Pete: Two and a half thousand buildings, including 1,300 houses. Twenty-five people have died. Six people are still missing in Victoria. And then we have the obviously the smoke and air quality issues. We’ve got smoke reaching New Zealand…

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: …across…

Ian: 2,000 kilometres of sea. And look, we have… you know, where we are, we’re hundreds of kilometres from the major fires in South Australia and eastern Victoria.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: But, you know, look at your window at the moment, we’ve got a visibility of46 probably 400 metres. 

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: And it’s just smoke.

Pete: Yeah, so that was what surprised me. I wasn’t expecting that. But then when I obviously realised that Kangaroo Island and some other places in South Australia are up in flames, as of, you know, a week or so ago, that smoke potentially arrived here. 

Ian: That smoke… Because typically our weather comes from the west. 

Pete: Yep.

Ian: And so, that air mass will move over from the west.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: But then we get daily on whichever direction the wind is going.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: That will come in as well. And at in the moment it’s very still. So, I think it’s that air mass coming in from South Australia.

Pete: Yeah. It was very funny waking up this morning, and Kel’s like, “Can you smell all the smoke?”. And I’m like, “I can’t inside.”

Ian: And you go outside…

Pete: And then as soon as I went outside and I was like, “Wow! It smells like someone’s… you know, they’re burning a fire in their backyard or something.”

Ian: Yeah. It does. Yeah.

Pete: So, Sydney’s been covered in haze for weeks as well.

Ian: And Canberra.

Pete: And Canberra now. I looked this up this morning. So, the normal air quality index, however they measure that, is… numerically that safe is ‘66’, ‘200’ is hazardous, and Canberra has peaked at ‘7700’…

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: …and is worse than Delhi in India. Lahore in Pakistan. And Shenyang in China.

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: Isn’t that just crazy? 

Ian: It is.

Pete: So, you know, what’s that, 66 times or no, 33 times worse than… than is safe. And Chris Moy, chair of the Australian Medical Association’s Ethics and Medical Legal Committee, has said that there are already people probably dying from smoke inhalation. Those who are already at the end of lung capacity issues. 

Ian: Yeah. And, look, that… Yeah, and that’s probably a good sort of prompt to talk about what people can do in these circumstances.

Pete: In terms of smoke?

Ian: Well, in terms of “How do you cope with bush fires?”

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: Now, obviously, if you’re just your average person living in a city like Canberra, you know, it’s a middle-sized city, it’s, what, nearly 300,000 people?

Pete: Yeah, it’s bigger than Geelong. So, about that.

Ian: Yeah. You’re not expecting to be directly affected by fire?

Pete: Yep.

Ian: Yes, there have been fires in Canberra, because Canberra has got a lot of bushland and stuff around it. But if you’re living in a suburban area, you don’t expect to be directly affected. But all of a sudden, you’re living with the equality that people can die from.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: And so, you need to take the appropriate precautions for that. And that’s typically not in somebody’s fire plan, because you’re not you don’t have a fire plan if you live in suburbia, typically. 

Pete: Well, that’s us here, right? Yeah.

Ian: Yeah. We’re never going to suffer directly from a bush fire here.

Pete: Yep. ‘Cause there’s no bush.

Ian: There’s no bush. Or the bush is… We’ve had fires in the, you know, the last remnant of bush, you know, on the Bellarine Peninsula, which is two kilometres from us.

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: But all you saw was a bit of smoke in the air, because it’s not significant in size. But we can be affected from… by fires hundreds of kilometres away by air quality. So, that’s a matter of knowing your own medical conditions that are likely to be affected. Typically, people with respiratory disease, asthma being the most problematic one, because asthma is typically triggered by a whole lot of things. But particulates in the air are one of those common ones.

Pete: Well, we had that a few… maybe a year or two ago where we had massive dust storms, right?

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: That were coming eastwards towards the larger cities. And there were some tragic stories of, say… I remember a young girl of sixteen years old dying on her front yard because she had an asthma attack from the dust in the air.

Ian: Yeah. Yeah. And that one was exacerbated as well by dry lightning.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: Because lightning affects the… And I’m not an astrophysicist here, but lightning and thunder, obviously, thunder is what we hear. Lightning is the actual event. It affects the quality of the air by doing something to the particulates as well. I think, you know, it electrifies them and they clump together. So, the particulates get larger.

Pete: Oh, really?

Ian: Yeah. And that’s something that, you know, I’m asthmatic67, but I’ve never heard of it. I’m 62 years old. 

Pete: So, it’s like a static electricity, right?

Ian: Yeah. It is. So that…

Pete: Making things attracted to one another?

Ian: The problems that you have in the atmosphere get worse. All of a sudden now that’s something… we’re getting warnings for asthmatics that come out saying, “Look, there is thunderstorm activity. And if that thunderstorm activity is coincident with already having smoke or smog in the air, then it is likely to affect people.”

Pete: It’s very bizarre, though, isn’t it, because it’s kind of like the smoke isn’t something most people plan for, as you say. And it’s almost like, I know you with your parents, both of your parents were heavy smokers.

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: And as a result, you never smoked, but you suffered from asthma. Likely…

Ian: Yeah. Likely… at least it was exacerbated by that.

Pete: Yeah. And everyone knows secondhand smoke is a big deal, right? You wouldn’t smoke inside a car with the window shop with your kids in the back, at least most people.

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: But that’s almost what’s happening here with bush fires.

Ian: Yeah.

Pete: And that the average person, like me, who thinks, “Oh, well, the bush fires aren’t going to affect me because there’s no bush here to burn.”, you forget that the smoke is quote, unquote, “like second hand cigarette smoke”, which could just, you know, linger over the… Like, if I were living in Canberra, the fires aren’t there, but you’re inhaling probably the equivalent of a pack or two a day, if you just go outside.

Ian: Yeah. Yeah. Enormous amounts of particulate matter. So…

Pete: Yeah.