Fires were deliberately lit

IN reference to the false claims made in the featured Letter of the Week which appeared in Saturday’s paper; how can Svargo Freitag accredit those fires to climate change?

A taskforce set up by Police Commissioner, Katarina Carroll, to determine whether any of the fires were deliberately lit has so far found 13 of those fires were either deliberately caused or caused by accident or reckless behaviour.

Ten fires - in Brisbane, Stanthorpe, the southeast and central Queensland regions - are believed to have been deliberately lit. It is an inconvenient truth to Greens leader, Richard Di Natale and to Queensland Labor’s Jackie Trad (as well as Mr Freitag apparently) that the most common causes of bushfires in Australia include lightning strikes, trees falling on powerlines, unintentional kindling of surrounding foliage during agricultural land clearing, dropped matches, cigarettes, sparks caused by power tools, farm machinery, controlled backburning escaping and plain, straight-out arson (as has been the case in several of the fires in Queensland).

The fires we have seen over the past couple of weeks were also described as having been “unprecedented” by several commentators.

These claims are also false when Queensland has a past history of devastating fires that occurred in 1951 when one million acres of sheep, cattle and farm country were burnt out and in 1953 when fires ravaged Brisbane, Nambour, Mapleton and Tweed Heads. Sandra Moore, Peeramon