Show fire respect
An ancient terror has struck again, in South Africa and elsewhere: fire! Terrifying fires have swept through Knysna and surrounding towns, destroying over 800 houses and killing at least seven people.
In the Grenfell high-rise building in London, fire has roasted over 70 people to death, including children.
In Portugal, forest fires have killed over 60 people.
In Pakistan, over 100 blackened corpses lie next to a ruined road tanker that overturned and caught fire.
Is there any pattern to these awful fires? None I can see. Each was different, and with hindsight we can see how each might have been prevented.
One of the frightening things about fire is how little it frightens us until it happens, always unexpectedly. We are surrounded by flammable or even explosive materials and yet we usually have no fear of them. Personally, I do fear them. In 1969, at my parents’ house in Cape Town, our wooden garage caught fire and burnt out my father’s car and my motorbike that I had bought a week before. I tried to enter the garage to rescue the bike but hit a wall of horrifying heat, as impenetrable as white hot steel. I can understand perfectly how parents can hear their children screaming in agony in a burning house and be quite unable to rescue them.
Until this day I feel a tingle of fear every time I go to a petrol station.
In 1666, London was changed forever by fire. This was during the extreme cold of the 17th century.
It is ridiculous to blame recent fires on “climate change”. The shifts and changes to our weather in the last 50 years or so have been slight and there is nothing to suggest they aren’t perfectly natural. There has been no increase in extreme weather events, which happen in all ages.
The Grenfell fire has been blamed on flammable thermal insulation on the outer walls. Apparently the greens wanted this to make the building more “energy efficient”.
The human species evolved in fire. Mastering fire, we learnt to cook food, which did some of the work of digestion.
We owe our dominion of the world to fire. It’s time we showed it more respect.