English Comprehension Skills

Posted: Sun, 8 February 2009 | permalink | No comments

The phrase "Total Fire Ban" is bandied around a lot these days -- mostly on days with high temperatures, low humidity, and high winds. To me, it isn't a particularly hard concept to understand, either: in the immortal words of Metallica, "Fire bad, Aircon goood!".

And yet, some people just don't seem to get it. This afternoon, my brigade got a page for a fire call to a reported "smoking log" behind town. When we got to where the log was, indeed, smoking, it was obvious that a group of people had had a large party around a bonfire last night.

Given the prevalence of large-scale fire incidents at the moment, anyone who feels that lighting up a bonfire, cracking open a large quantity of alcohol, and then leaving the damn fire going in the morning, is a good idea, really needs to have their head examined.

In other firefighting-related news, despite being the on-call brigade for our district this week, we've not been called to assist at any of the fires currently burning both to our north and south. It's frustrating that having been trained to fight bushfires, and with so many areas currently needing some serious firefighting, my district isn't getting asked to help out. On the other hand, they don't appear to be hurting for resources at these fires (with several hundred RFS personnel, not to mention NSWFB and NPWS people, at the Peats Ridge fire; also, some 200 RFS personnel have been dispatched to Victoria), so it's good to know that there's plenty of bush firefighting volunteers around if things get bad around here.


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