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.
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.