Burn baby, burn!

Standing in the backyard yesterday it was easy to think a storm was brewing. Thick, bulbous clouds massed around the city and a similar storm head was pushing high into the sky over the back of Osborne Park.

But they weren't clouds of course, they were thick plumes of smoke from fires raging in Kings Park and... well, I don't know exactly where the other fire was.

Further north another loose-head pyromaniac was fiddling about with the Red Head matches in the Yanchep National Park and down south the bush around Bridgetown was about to be torched.

With the temperature nudging 42 degrees celcius, it was odds on that the fire nuts would come out to play, particularly with the Sydney blazes featuring heavily in the news.

I'm told that a lot of fires are actually started by volunteer firies who are keen to see action, but that's not a path I want to go down. I've heard enough stories about walls of flame that charge down valleys like blazing tsunamis to know that it's a job only for those with the sizeable cojones.

Today it would seem that Kings Park is 'contained', albeit scarred and blackened across a wide area, but Yanchep and Bridgetown continue to burn. Smoke hangs heavy across a large part of WA, including the Perth suburbs where I'm at.

Right now I'm sitting here looking out across a Beijing-like skyline, wearing a shirt that's soaked up its own small part of the Kings Park smoke. I wonder if the foreshore ferris wheel kept turning during the fire? Seems almost perverse really to think that people were paying $15 a pop to watch the city's landmark burn, but hey, you gotta make your money where you can get it.