Nearly jumped out my skin a few minutes ago when sirens started blaring. The emergency alert system just triggered, with this generic message about wildfires.
Not any actual impending ones about to burn my house down. Just the general possibility. Because of a heatwave nobody has apparently noticed.
Thought the bomb was about to drop for a second. Has nobody in our government heard the story about the boy who cried wolf?
Sorry if this is venting but this rather caught me by surprise.
This is such a weird use of this system. Months of wildfires and Labours first action is to send a phone alert that amounts to ‘only you can stop wildfires.’
Even better, an hour or two after it was sent a local business set off fireworks. Fucking stupidity everywhere.
They only brought in a ban on disposal BBQs today after dithering about it for ages.
A reluctance to do anything practical but they are very trigger happy in abusing an emergency alert system.
Do you guys have any sort of “fire ban/fire restriction” legislation? It sounds like you don’t have normal channels of communication for this kind of thing, hence the emergency alerts.
Maybe your government can do a bit of copy and paste from Australia, eg this is my “fire info” page for my home state of Queensland, showing which shire council areas currently have a fire ban in place.
All this stuff is enforced via legislation at state level here, which you don’t have a direct equivalent of. Probably something higher than shire councils and lower than UK parliament would deal with it over there as it’s broadly region based. Once it’s legislated with various steps between “all ok” and “don’t even light a match”, the decision to enforce a ban doesn’t take much dithering about. Here bans can be put in place by the Queensland fire department at their discretion so politicians keep out of it.
We also have signs like these sprinkled around the place so that people know when it’s not a great time to be having a bonfire. In Australia that usually ends up being one continuous block between October and March.
We more have “flood action plans”, “flood alerts” and so on, because generally speaking, our problem is too much water, not too much fire. I can’t remember there ever being “wildfires” in the UK ever (doesn’t mean it didn’t happen). How would anything set on fire when everything is permanently wet?
So in a way this is either a freakish one-off anomaly, or this now normal for every year of the rest of our lives.
I’m still expecting our traditional floods and deadly wind storms in a few weeks.
Don’t expect traditional floods. The dead, crispy, grass and plants everywhere means landslides and goodness knows what to the structures around them.
Also the dry, solid mud surface won’t absorb water very easily, so the water will flow over it instead of soaking into it. Basically all our “soakaway” is possibly compromised.
Its ok, we’ll be having both for the rest of our lives.
Most places that do ban fires here just ban them all year round. Never seen them compare different types of fire either, its always any flame is banned if they do. As if a camp fire and camping stove are the same risk…
Obviously with how dry things are in a lot of places right now I get banning all fires. But in January after a week of endless rain the same signs are there.
What practical things would you have them do?
Make the fossil fuel industry pay for solar panels.
Lol.
Felt like an underlining of their new policy to
banadjust the guidelines to voluntarily stop the use of disposable BBQs. They are under a lot of pressure to actually do some mitigation since water is running low and crops are failed but apparently this was the actual action, banning BBQs and alerting everyone to that new guideline!!!Only disposable BBQs, which I support because they are shit to cook on.