Anyway this evening I will write up the time the Australian Army tried to burn down Lithgow (and did torch the Zig Zag tourist Railway). With lots of clips from the army commission of inquiry, which is full of deadset incredible shade thrown at the ADF folks involved.

In the mean time, here's a write up from (newly officially a doctor) @amycoopes of her experience in the fire. It's quite scary, as a heads up. https://making-of.afp.com/bapteme-du-feu-en-australie

So the backstory here is the army have a training base out at Marrangaroo, a few km NW of Lithgow. On October 16 2013, a day of high fire danger (and the day before a total fire ban day), the likely lads doing work on defusing bombs decided to make things go bang.

It's probably worth mentioning that the Marrangaroo Training Area hadn't been back burned in a long time because there was crap all over the place on the ground that would go bang. Folks with say, basic reasoning skills, might spot a logic flaw here. Not the ADF folks!

"we decided to blow some shit up that we didn't need" reminder this was a day of high fire danger. A thing the report will mention later, *pointedly*

Here's where we start getting into the comedy. Oh shit we set off a fire let's try stomping on it. That's ok the Army Stryker unit is here to save the day!

The "Stryker" (cool name, if you're a 1980s hair metal band) is a fucking ute with a water tank, a pump and a garden hose. Yeah that's gonna be excellent at fire suppression.

(Ron Howard voiceover) The Stryker was not effective at suppressing the fire

UXO = unexploded ordinance. Aka things were going bang and RFS correctly said "absolutely get fucked we are not putting our people into that" (also I forget if it is mentioned in the report but folks couldnt find the keys for the fire entrance gate)

Oh we just left high explosives lying around, oops.

Here's where the report starts to sharpen the claws. To translate this - the official procedures were don't do this because fire risk, some idiot went eh whatever let's make shit go bang.

I'm only in the executive summary so far. Much comedy to come but break for dinner.

And back. Now let's get into the findings of the report. The first is polite inquiry speak for "the fuck were you doing?" (They were making things go bang for shits and giggles)

"Cool you just lost track of explosive stuff there's no possible fucking issues here" (there are issues here)

The shit ute wasn't even able to get close enough to the fire because (again) they hadn't backburned the range.

I joked that Stryker sounded like a hair metal band name and yeah

Amazing stuff, although not 80s

"yeah good call running away, but, and this is a big one..."

"... how the fuck did this happen? Why are we having to point out how this was an obvious Do Not Do This incident?"

Yeah you don't get to dump the consequences of your epic fuckup on the RFS. This is on you clowns.

Probably should not have started that fire, hey.

A brief interlude as to how this affected us on Crisis. We were in the process of launching public alerts with NSW RFS. It was live, but this was back in 2013, back when October wasn't fire season, so we weren't expecting to see real fire alerts coming through the system.

Thanks Army. Our dark launch (unpublicized) was not so dark. Once again - thanks, Army.

Back to the report. Here's a jaw dropper. They hadn't done a hazard reduction burn in *20 years*. They had only bothered to maintain a single fire trail, and they had water tanks just sitting around unused. *slow claps* all round.

Reminder, this was land covered with bits of unexploded stuff. You might think a priority would be to make sure it doesn't catch fire. If so you clearly not suited to a role in the ADF.

Given the actions of the ADF on this day, it's *amazing* the RFS thought poorly of them. Truly beyond understanding why the RFS might regard them as a pack of fuckwits.

Nope. Just epic epic fucking lack of judgement and common sense.

So a brief recap. On a day of high fire danger, at the start of a fire season that was predicted to be bad, a bunch of army chucklefucks blew up some shit on an area that was a fire trap. That's ok I'm sure the fire will stay contained inside the army base right?

It did not stay confined to the army base.

Back to the report throwing shade, real "were you hiding behind the door when brains were being handed out?" stuff

"yeah we should probably fix that hey"

Now onto the recommendations. A bunch of them are "how about you idiots try doing a counting exercise of your things that go bang" (I'm going to suggest they might need to take shoes off to get past 10)

I have a suggestion of it not being a sTrKyEr. Perhaps something that is actually being able to put out fires. Just a suggestion.

"how about you work with the grownups since you are clearly not even remotely competent"

More shade wrt "you will talk to the grownups who know what the fuck they are doing, as you clearly do not"

"We cannot believe we have to explain that starting fires on days when shit is likely to burn needs to be said and yet, here we are. The BoM website is right there"

The rest of the report is narrative. It's 66 pages, and you can download the report into the clown show here https://news.defence.gov.au/media/media-releases/media-release-commission-inquiry-report-marrangaroo-training-area

So after the fire spread from the army area, it became a serious goddam problem.

Fun bit - for a few days there was confusion as to whether the old WW1 era chemical weapon munitions that had been historically stored there had been completely cleared out. Given the folks there inability to keep track of stuff, the concern was legit.

What happens if 95 year old mustard gas shells go up in a bushfire a few kms from Lithgow? Nothing good. Luckily the folks who had cleared that stuff out had been more competent than the regular staff at MTA and we never had to find out.

The official name for the fire over the subsequent days was "State Mine Fire" (at work we called it the "Thanks, Army! Fire" 500 houses were destroyed, the historic Zig Zag Railway was heavily damaged (bitter irony it was only repaired late last year only to burn again)

More on the fire here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_New_South_Wales_bushfires

Anyway our still not officially launched RFS public alerts feed starts sending out alerts and hey, cool, it worked fine. Would have preferred that we had been able to launch it officially on our own schedule. Thanks again, Army.

A couple of US coworkers who were in Sydney to help work on the launch got the very Australian experience of "everything smells of smoke" (it's the smell of summer!) and blood red sunsets.

Postscript I still don't know how I earned this block.

@threadreaderapp unroll some people prefer to read that way