Yes, its shocking really, also I recall some time back in US where a fire fighter was deliberately lighting fires, took years to catch him, eventually they got him using DNA.
Was that John Orr?
His story was covered in the book by Joseph Wambaugh "Fire Lover".
And more often than not, they're also members of the local volunteer fire brigade :
I reckon they must get bored not being able to fight fires and eventually have to go out and light one to "see some action". Sorta like the "Jarhead" movie scenario of no fighting that the star exerienced.
My friend and I nearly burned a house down when we were kids...a silly day of matches, petrol and firecrackers - we didn't see any danger at all, of course.
Back to the folk (usually zealot Greenies) who oppose burn-offs and hazard reduction....
Think about this; about 400 million years ago there were bushfires, thunderstorms, lightning and so on, then hot spells with no rain after long periods of growth....the lightning would ignite the undergrowth and burn the whole joint to the ground,
And then the growth starts all over again...a few years and then another burn down..
Then us idiots come along and go; "Hang on; you can't burn down that undergrowth; little animals live in there!"
The lightning and undergrowth don't care about the the animals, or us humans in our houses, and in the end they will trump the zealot Greenie every time.
Reductions of hazards are necessary in our world of cohabitation with the bush, unfortunately.
Zealot greenies
....here's one for ya's;
I used to work at a golf club which originally was a series of horse paddocks owned by a very wealthy and prominent surgeon. He decided to turn the paddocks into a weekend retreat golf club for him and his friends.
Fast forward 50 years to when I began working there in 1983 and it is a beautiful forest-like setting with millions of massive gums, pines and others, rabbits, foxes, kangaroos, the odd koala, echidnas, lizards, snakes, birds, frogs in the water ponds and so on - magnificent place.
Of course; the trees occasionally sprout branches which impede on the golf hole and passage to the green for the golfers, so the golf club groundstaff would go and cut off the offending branches.
Every time this happened while I was there (maybe 6 times in the two or so years I worked there) the next day there was a putting green/s destroyed by vandalism, in the form of either petrol poured or a shovel used to dig up the surface to spell the word "trees".
Now; to me this is idiotic; the photos of that golf course back in 1930 show about 80 acres of mostly bare, treeless paddocks with a handful of horses wandering around, compared to a lush, densely treed setting of today, and these stupid people carry on because of a few branches cut down here and there....
