Couple pics of Australian fires

[lew]

A good friend of ours has a brother living near Canberra Australia who took these pictures from his front porch. He said the fire is starting to move away from his house but threatens some near-by towns.

Sure would be a scary place to live right now.

[captpierre]

Brutal.  I can’t imagine the slow moving Koalas dealing with a fast approaching fire.  So many have died a miserable death. 😞

[lew]

I saw a show on TV recently and they said Koalas instinctively climb as high in the trees as possible when there's danger so the poor little guys don't stand a chance.

[captpierre]

19 hours ago, lew said:

I saw a show on TV recently and they said Koalas instinctively climb as high in the trees as possible when there's danger so the poor little guys don't stand a chance.

Horrible way to die. You know all about fire, Lew.   😐

[cisco]

Sad and I find it strange that the Amazon fire has been totally dropped in exchange for the Australian disaster. i tried to find updates on the Amazon one but little available. It still seems to be going but no media coverage of note from what i found. 

[Old Ironmaker]

I read today that the rainy season has started in Australia, not soon enough.

As far as the Amazon fires and we all know how critical the Amazonian Rain Forest is to our delicate planet. A little known fact is that the very massive Brazilian steel industries integrated plants where  liquid iron is produced to make steel .At the plant we visited in 98' in Brazil used 100% charcoal to fire their Blast Furnaces. We use metallurgical coal that is used in turn to make metallurgical coke in Canada, the US and most plants around the world. The charcoal the Brazilians used was made from trees felled in the rain forests of the Amazon. That's million of tonnes of trees to make millions of tonnes of steel. Coke  to Iron rate is around 3 to 1. Maybe more with basically wood. Brazilian steel production is far larger by millions of tonnes a year than here in Canada. Maybe more than integrated plants that still exist in the US. Not good and one never hears about it. I hope that plant was the only plant not using coke. I doubt it. Talk about a carbon footprint. 

Apparently not just Brazil. It's an old paper. However there are several countries using wood to fire Blast Furnaces today. 

http://www.fao.org/3/03500e/03500e07.htm

Edited February 18, 2020 by Old Ironmaker