If you want up to date news coverage of the Victorian bushfires, or the Queensland floods, the ABC has excellent coverage. The short version: 35 people are confirmed to have died, with that number to rise, from the fire that’s burned through the ranges to Melbourne’s north and north-east. Ar least one town, including the resort town of Marysville, appears to have been completely destroyed. Further to the east, another fire in Gippsland has threatened a number of towns there. And there are big fires in western and north-eastern Victoria (not near my family, thankfully).
If you do have relatives in the area who you haven’t been able to contact, the Red Cross are tracing these up. If you want to help, sending some cash their way, or one of the other usual relief agencies, is the best way to go.
I hope that all LP readers, and their families and friends, are keeping safe from whatever nature and firebugs throw at them.
I know the area of the fire near Melbourne pretty well; the roads are perfect driving and cycling spots. Sadly, it’s not entirely a surprise to hear that houses, and perhaps even whole towns, have been lost in these areas. If you look at the satellite photo of the area, places like Humevale, Strathewen, and Kinglake are located right in the middle of eucalypt forest. Humevale is a collection of houses strewn through that forest on the middle of a hill. Kinglake is located right on the top of a ridge, with forest leading right up to the edge of town. Marysville, a particularly beautiful little tourist town, is also right in the middle of eucalypt forest in the middle of a mountain range. The area got burned through in the 1939 Black Friday fires, the township of Narbethong (heavily damaged, according to reports) destroyed on that occasion as well.
It is more of a shock to hear that so many lives have been lost. Since the Ash Wednesday bushfires, a lot of measures have been taken to try and avoid repeating the human tragedy that accompanied that natural disaster. Given the absence of lives lost in the massive 2003 and 2006 fires, I’d hoped that we’d learned well. Clearly, there is more to learn.
The police are reporting “suspicions” that at least some of the fires were deliberately lit, and, statistically, about half of all bushfires are. At the bushfire cooperative research center, there’s a research program into bushfire arson. Perhaps in the wake of yesterday, the suggestions of this prescient press release might get some consideration along with the inevitable calls for more of Elvis’s buddies to be made available.
One final point – some of these fires are in Melbourne’s water catchments, or close to them. Melbourne’s long-term water supply will be affected, but by how much obviously won’t be clear until they’re out and a proper survey can be made. But expect to hear more about this in the days, weeks, and months ahead.
Note (RM): Edited to reflect the news as best I understand it. Marysville is largely destroyed. Grave fears are held for other places but no confirmation yet.
A thoughtfull post, Robert.
We are all in shock and worried about this dreadful taste of things to come.
Marysville . . . (remembers there are children present and shuts mouth)
i’m no Christian, let alone a catholic, but if i get any of Uncle Kev’s stimulous package i’ll pay a tithe to the CFA.
According to ABC, there’s idiots lighting more fires in the Latrobe Valley, where (if I’m reading the figures right) 9 people have died so far and maybe up to 20. I can see a bit of vigilante justice in these creeps’ future.
Bird of paradox @3: thanks for that, I was just going to post a similar link.
Through the xenophobic years of the Rattozoic Era, we had masses of hysterical propoaganda attempting to drum into us that we were under threat from ‘terrorists’, who, supposedly, were people with brown skin, beards, and SIM cards borrowed from dodgy cousins.
When will pollies and media get their heads around the idea that we already had a home-grown terrorist problem that vastly outweighed any hazard from people who looked…foreign?
Hopefully, we’ll see a bit of fence-mending with the Hitherto Unjustly Suspected now we are post-Rat and post-Dubya, and some realistic evaluation of where the real Menaces To Society actually lie.
Bushfire arsonists can and regularly do kill innocent people, cause millions in property damage, wipe out whole towns, and do immeasurable damage to water catchments and National Parks. THIS is a serious, ongoing threat to our society and environment.
In this inflammable country, arsonists deserve life without parole in high-security prison. And anyone who shoots them on catching them red-handed should be treated very leniently (I am thinking ‘nomination for Order of Australia’ rather than ’3 years suspended for manslaughter’, but that’s just me).
I’m a bit worried the CFA Vic website has bogged to a standstill due to heavy demand.
(Please don’t navigate to it unless you need to)
The fire maps are undownloadable. That should never happen; all content needs to be mirrored elsewhere. The ABC and other major media networks are obvious places for a start.
Nick: this is the first time, to my knowledge, when they’ve had such good information available from the CFA website.
I suspect that the powers that be at the CFA didn’t quite appreciate what kind of demand for that information there would be.
Correction: it’s the DSE producing the fire maps, and their site that had slowed to a halt.
The CFA site appeared to be running well until a few minutes ago, but has now disappeared completely.
Stay away from both the CFA and DSE websites unless you really need to use them.
Too many visits is causing them to crash – and the information they have will be critical for many to survive.
Robert, yeah I appreciate that.
Without wanting to seem like I’m sinking a boot in, the network admins should have been well aware of their server limitations in advance and prepared for any number of contingencies. They are responsible for hosting emergency information after all.
I hope they seriously consider mirroring to the hugely high-bandwidth ABC servers in the future.
My following overnight of these dreadful fires suggested that the Marysville folk were possibly mislead by a wind shift change that quickly left them exposed, but that advice had been for them to stay put – a very tough ask with towering infernos bearing down and spotting said to be up to four kilometres ahead of it.
From Robert’s topographical description it sounds like these hamlets were almost un-defendable given the weather conditions.
Newsradio are doing an excellent coverage of the fires and is very useful for those outside of Victoria in keeping abreast of the news, have reported that the Death toll is now 49
And this has now risen to 50.
Brumby said last night that this could be a one in a thousand year event. Our premier has not come to grips with the new reality.
Apparently, Brumby has signaled that arsonists are going to have the book thrown at them, including murder charges. These people are very sick puppies who need putting away permanently.
The Adelaide Advertiser also has a fire map @ adelaidenow.com. It was horrifying to see how much of Victoria is ablaze!
Fire maps were available for the 2006 fires and they are interactive.
Clearly there is an arsonist working around Beechworth, Myrtleford, Yackandandah area and their activity can be tracked on the DSE fire maps but probably not today so that those in the fire zone estimate when to expect the fire.
When I was waiting for fires to come through in the last fire season I was surprised at how high tech the fire fighting was. A light plane flies over the the fire front after sunset so the fire can be accurately mapped, the plane also flies over at other the fire front at other intervals but smoke hampers visibility. The interactive fire maps are produced twice daily. Additionally personnel on the ground drive along the ground to check on the fire.
If a fire is expected the CFA check each property for fire hazards and record the names of all dwellings occupants and decide where to build the fire containment lines. I have been told that most people would be shocked at the authority that fire crews have to fight bush fires. I think its along the lines of your house is a fire hazard or your house is in the line of the fire break so we will bulldoze it and you might not be eligible for compensation if you haven’t cleared the property of hazardous materials.
That said, I have nothing but admiration for the fire fighters, almost all of the CFA fire fighters are volunteers who may be risking their paid employment by fire fighting and their employers who show tolerance and understanding during the fire season. Can you imagine KPMG being relaxed about an employee missing for 3 weeks without notice during the fire season?
Yes.
Victoria has had at least four of these events in the last 150 years.
And there are some old realities.
Dense eucalypt forest and semi-suburban settlement don’t mix. When you add strong, fluky winds to those preconditions, the consequences are inevitable.
Living in places like Kinglake is risky. The question is, who are bearing the risk?
Katz,
sorry to hear you lost a house in the Ash Wednesday fires.You’re correct: these catastrophes aren’t completely unknown in Vic.
Thanks Ambi.
It’s a long time ago now. But the events of the past days have revived dormant memories. We were lucky. No lives were lost. But everything, with the exception of one Russian silver egg cup, which I am looking at now, was burned or melted. How this single egg cup survived (one of a pair) I’ll never know. Strange.
Building regs forbid construction on land prone to flooding. Yet development is allowed willy-nilly in Kinglake-like areas. I grew up in one. Fathers of several of my childhood friends were burned to death as CFA volunteers fighting fires much smaller than these fires.
And here’s another analogy to consider: in tornado areas in the USA, people have storm cellars.
Katz, sorry to read about your misfortune. I hope you and your family get back on your feet soon.
Having been through quite a number of cyclones, (7 maybe?) i’ll take my chances with floods and crocs over bushfires anytime.
Katz
I can imagine how those memories might re-surface. We lived in a house on a steepish ridgeline on the edge of thick bushland, next to a farm, for more than 20 years. Learnt about fire preparations etc in a rush after Ash Wednesday. We had one reasonably secure refuge room, but it was never tested in a real fire. After our kids grew up and left home, we (after several years) just became weary of facing 2 months of bushfire weather every summer. So we left.
One of yesterday’s large fires “missed” our old house by perhaps half a km. That refuge room has still not been tested; not in a real emergency, anyway. Several former neighbours’ houses were saved yeaterday by aerial water bombing. Lucky.
OTOH, they were wonderful years, living in the bush.
I would like to condemn Andrew Bolt’s risible and disgraceful posts seeking to politicise deaths from the heatwave and bushfires by harnessing them to the denialist and anti-Green horses he’s flogging:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_killed_in_a_green_frenzy
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/preaching_over_the_dead/
By contrast, Victorian officials and John Brumby have spoken directly, urgently when needed, and without horse-shit. Ditto Kevin Rudd. I don’t expect Herald-Sun readers will take this nonsense seriously. Folk don’t like ambulance-chasing politicians [journo-politicians] trying to “take advantage” of a catastrophe.
IMO.
Refuge rooms never figured in the thinking of my childhood neighbourhood. I guess human ingenuity could devise one. It couldn’t be under the house because if it burned its occupants would bake like potatoes in their jackets.
Yes, Ambi. Growing up on Melbourne’s fringes was great fun. I knew every rock and eddy of the nearby Yarra River. When I read Huck Finn I immediately recognised another version of my biography.
Far be it from me to put forward a contentious proposition, but there is something that must be said here.
Eucalyptus trees are a noxious weed. They invaded this country millennia ago and has driven out all other species. They do this by using fire, The eucalyptus tree is basically fire-proof – in the sense that it comes back after the worst fire. Other species just die.
I propose to wood-chip all the bloody gum trees, with giant machines, turn them into mulch and to plant European species in their place, Mulberry and Oak,etc.
This will have three effects.
1. It will massively reduce the fire hazard from these lighter fluid factories
2. Massively increase the soil fertility as the deciduous trees drop their leaves and thus bring up buried soil nutrients
3. Re-create the atmosphere of insensate rage and abuse that erupted when I suggested this strategy to a meeting of greens and earth hugging hippies in Woodford a few years ago. “How dare you suggest that we destroy our natural environment” and so on.
Well how many people are going to have to die before we wake up to the fact that Eucalyptus trees are one of the most successful weeds of all time, They are successful because they manufacture lots of very volatile eucalyptus oil. They must be destroyed or we need to leave the southern part of the continent and all move to Brisbane: Fuck off wetbacks I was here first.
Huggy
Do cane toads eat eucalypts?
Oh thanks, Katz. A whole mouthful of single malt gone to waste, sprayed all over the keyboard.
Frank Calabrese mentioned Newsradio coverage. They cancelled normal coverage last night for continuous bushfire coverage and are doing so again tonight with experienced radio presenters on the job.
The ABC has a special bushfire site with among other features an amazing photo gallery. At the bottom of the page is a map showing the main fire centres.
The latest toll is 96.
This adds up to a major tragedy. I wonder about generalised advice suggesting people stay in their houses. Personally I think I’d go for early evacuation provided there was a good line of flight.
The Courier Mail also has a photo gallery and there’s another one on the Qld floods.
For those thinking that the whole of Queensland is under water this is emphatically not so. The heavy coastal rain seems to be mostly from Mackay north. We had 55mm at our place in January, about a third of average and less than half median. February is shaping up even drier. It’s still green and very pleasant for this time of year, but the lack of rain is a worry.
There is an interesting post on extreme weather on this Kiwi blog riffing off a post by Barry Brook in Adelaide.
AB, “…far deadlier than this jihad against airconditioners…”
This is a signpost though:
“Let’s ignore the obvious reply—that in fact the globe has cooled since 2002, although, true, it may soon warm again.”
ABC News at 1am WDT has revised that figure down to 93.
And I am annoyed that our commercial media are concentrating on the death of the Melbourne Newsreader Brian Naylor at the exclusion of the other deaths.
Incidentally, just to clear up some terminology, a ‘backburn” is something you do while a bushfire is going, the idea being to deliberately create a low-intensity fire in front of the main fire to deprive it of fuel, right there and then. I believe it works particularly well if there’s been a wind change and you can run the backburn directly towards the main fire front.
Lighting fires on less dangerous days for to prevent a major bushfire is generally called ‘burning off” or a fuel reduction burn.
Brian, a lot of the reports already indicate that at least some of the dead were in cars and caught by the fire.
“Fires and flood” then comes pest….Andrew Bolt.
MHW,
I haven’t seen the news for only 24 hours and wtf suddenly 108 are confirmed dead?
I’m not so sure it is just an issue of fame. It could just be an issue of proximity within media circles going for the quickest local source on the ground – maybe no one has even interviewed the other families yet.
On the other other hand, I thought the comments about Naylor and his wife were touching. And who in the public wants their pain and despair and loss put in the papers and on television anyway?
Brian, they had no warning in some places. ‘Leave early’ is advice predicated on the assumption that there will be early warning. What with 60m high fire fronts moving ar 100km/h, and arsonists lighting fires on the edges of townships, it looks like Victoria needs to start legislating concrete bunkers under houses.
Frank, no other names have been released
“….Victoria needs to start legislating concrete bunkers under houses.”
I drove through Kinglake at Christmas time and saw some land advertised for sale- about 15 acres- that sounded reasonably priced and beautiful. I must admit the conversation then went to partial underground house building.
If they are to allow reconstruction up there something like that sounds very wise to me, Laura. I do not think that just having a fire plan will be good enough anymore. It will be.. do you have a bullet proof house design?
You’d need something to address the fact that there would be no air to breathe in the underground bunker.
Here, here, Laura (or is that hear hear?) anyway. Good idea and a simple one. Going underground has the added benefit of not only being fireproof but at least 15 degrees cooler.
Interesting idea Huggy bunny. A noxious weed is an invasive species, (ya?) but how long do you have to have lived in a place before you’re not considered ‘invasive’? Eucalpyts may have helped in the degradation of the soil, as you attest, but the wholesale pulping of them in order to plant, oak trees and mulberries seems a little problematic given our pathetic soils and sod all rain. We could end up completely denuded very quickly. I admire your courage and audacity though!
Helen – as long as the bunker’s not directly under a whole bunch of solid fuel, e.g. the house or a shed or big trees (i.e. it’s in a clearing or paddock), then the fire would pass pretty quickly. The amount of time you’d need to keep the lid down would be no more than half an hour usually.
Helen, semi underground houses (“Hobbit style”) have been built for years. Imagine a large earthen mound with windows and grass. The ones I have been in are superb – no need for air conditioning and there is plenty of air.
The number one no no for houses in fire prone areas is the tile roof. I have seen slow mo film of the tiles on a roof that are actually sucked off the roof by the pressure reduction in part of the advancing fire front. The flames then just dive into the home and destroy it in minutes. The film was made by some-one in the CSIRO and then suppressed at the behest of the tile industry.
Huggy
I do understand that being in a car is one of the worst places to be caught in a fire. Last night the advice was that if you are in that situation, try to find a clear place without grass or trees and then get down as low as possible, outside the car, covering yourself with a woolen blanket.
One woman on Newsradio pointed out that with a 100kph wind the fire travels at 2 kilometers per minute. So if you decide to go and actually leave 7 minutes later the fire has travelled about 14k. Also it is not easy to outrun fires moving that fast, especially if the escape route is a winding bush road through the mountains.
My wife heard of one person saying “By the time I’d packed the car…”
In the 1960s I lived in Belair in the Adelaide hills for three years in a street that ran north-south across the eastern slope of a hill where the southern end led to a winding track, so I thought and worried a lot about what to do in a fire emergency because we were in an area that had been subject to fire within living memory. Luckily nothing happened.
According to the ABC the latest death toll is 108.
Unofficially, on Sunrise, they’re saying it could be as many as 170 dead. Must stress about 9am that was unofficial. Guess we’ll get the full horror story later in the day.
In 1939 – a firestorm similar to 83 and 09 – some sought shelter in dugouts and survived but others didn’t.
(There’s a semi-underground room in this suburban house that has kept cool without air-con during the recent fierce heat-wave, so I think cellars/basements could be on the wider agenda too for green housing design.)
We are all shocked at the terrible death toll. Brian Naylor’s death is shocking on another level, as millions of Victorians grew up with him on the television every night. He was quintessentially Melbourne to me.
It should be borne in mind that some of the fires were so fierce that there would probably be no feasible course of action which would make survival a likely prospect if you happened to caught up in it. Nonetheless I think authorities are going to have to look very seriously at mandating the construction of fire bunkers in houses and buildings situated in areas of high fire risk.
I notice that some of Bolt’s chooks at his blog have, predictably, put themselves forward as instant experts on fire hazard reduction burning and attempting to blame environmentalists for the alleged lack of it. One wonders how they explain the 1939 and 1983 disasters. The problem is that this sort of tendentious commentary can derail a very important debate that needs to take place about what kind of land management regime is needed to optimise both ecological and human safety objectives. Hazard reduction burning designed to emulate and maintain ecological fire regimes (which, in Australia, have in large measure been shaped by Aboriginal land management practices) is, in general, what is required. This statement needs to be qualified by noting: (a) that a lot of research is still required to ascertain the ecological fire regimes in many areas; (b) a lot of resources are required to maintain the necessary program of hazard reduction burning; (c) post-1788 land use practices have fundamentally disrupted the pre-1788 ecological fire regime in much of Australia; (d) climate change will also have consequences for ecological fire regimes and thus for hazard reduction practices.
Further to my first paragraph above, John Brumby is saying that the “stay and defend or leave early” advice given to property owners may need to be reviewed in the light of events.
There is a theory that you should burn off as soon as ever a patch will burn, so that wildlife can just move over and then move back and there is never sufficient fuel to sustain a large fire. I recall that Western Australia has had an aggressive burning off policy for some decades and a remarkable reduction in wildfires. Others may know more about this.
It seems unlikely, though, that this strategy would be at all practical in Victoria and especially the southern half of NSW where there are vast tracts of highly combustible forests subject to those dry northerly winds that make for a particularly dangerous situation.
Brian, after forested areas of Nathan Campus of Griffith University caught fire twice in two years (incinerating 35 cars and almost the entire campus on the second occasion) the University and Brisbane City Council adopted a fire management strategy for Toohey Forest based on controlled mosaic burning, which basically involved setting low intensity fires in discrete patches on a staggered basis mimicking the fire history of the forest, much as you describe in your first par. We had the benefit of some very good research by our environmental scientists on the fire regime in the forest. As you suggest in your second par, much research would be needed on the fire history and fire regimes of Victorian and southern NSW bushland to help determine what an appropriate hazard reduction policy would be in those areas.
It should also be noted that our pre-existing knowledge base about Toohey Forest’s fire history enable us to successfully argue against those within the University who wanted to adopt a fire management strategy based on frequent broadscale high intensity fuel reduction burning, which would have both degraded the ecosystem and increased the fire hazard by encouraging the growth of fire-loving plant species.
Ive been in rural Timor and have been compltely out of the news cycle. This is just shocking – a disaster. Im speechless – 108 killed?
So much for the smug conceit that half-hearted climate action is somehow “pragmatic” in this country. There’s nothing pragmatic about playing around now. Its just plain foolishness – pigheaded foolishness – in the face of extremely worrying evidence.
I hope people can rebuld their lives in tose areas. Maryville is beautiful.
The Victorian “knowledge base” on fire behaviour was certainly revised substantially after the Ash Wednesday fires, which followed a long drought [broken only by the advent of the Hawke Govt, as RJLH joked at the time].
For example, experienced fire fighters reported that some gullies, which had always in the past been too damp to burn, did catch light in 1983. This made fire fighting more difficult of course: less predictable spread of fire, and higher fuel load.
Apart from persons burnt in their vehicles, we may hear this time of unfortunate folk burnt in their houses. Current advice is that sheltering indoors with curtains, blinds drawn (in case windows shatter, and to keep radiant heat out); plenty of water, will save your life. {Metal exterior shutters on windows, even better; trees and fuel well clear of house, etc.} The fire front passes (in a few minutes only). You then venture up into the roof cavity to put out any smouldering timber [if you blocked gutters beforehand, most embers will have gone out before they could be swept up inside the roof]. Then check outside, e.g. timber window frames, posts, wooden decking, etc for smouldering timber. Put it out.
The story was that sometimes a house wouldn’t seem to be on fire, for about 20-30 minutes after the fire front passed. But at the moment the residents saw it was on fire, nothing could be done because the fire had been spreading across inside the roof cavity, unseen; and ceilings then quickly crashed into rooms setting the interior alight.
It may be that in very intense radiant heat and with direct flame contact, your average brick veneer or timber house catches fire in seconds. Then a secure basement, preferably under a concrete house slab or set into the hillside (modern version of the old “dugout bush shelter”) is your only reliable refuge. We’ll find out in due course.
The house we lost in 1983 had floor-to-ceiling windows half-facing the direction of the fire.
On the high sills of those windows we placed empty wine bottles celebrating good vintages and good times.
When we raked through the ashes we found dozens of those bottles unbroken but with their necks collapsed and fused to their bases. In other words, the bottles melted before the sill they stood on burned.
The radiant heat that caused this phenomenon must have been very great. No human being could have survived in that house until the moment it actually caught fire.
Sublime Cowgirl @21 [without wanting to diminish the pain of those suffering floods] right on!
I’d rather drown than burn to death ANY DAY, plus at least water acts more or less predictably, tending to fall out of the sky and then run downhill. Bummer when there is no hill, but still preferable to the capricious violence of fire.
I’ve put up a new post.
Well said, Paul.
From my limited understanding, bureaucracy driven fire management regimes such as WA’s 200 000 hectare mandate have perverse side effects that include undermining the quality of timber intended for harvesting through the increased susceptibility of trees to certain fungi and the destruction of vital habitat trees.
I was listening to the radio this morning (have forced myself to turn it off now) and I caught an interview with a senior academic who lectures in the area of ‘fire ecology and management’ or something like that. He (didn’t catch his name) was saying that the conditions were so perfect for fire that the fires reached a magnitude where they formed a ‘convection tunnel’ which sounded as though the heat was sucking all oxygen towards itself and basically the fires became unstoppable, he actually compared it to an atomic bomb. It sounds unsurvivable for anything caught in its path and he said it was way beyond what one normally thinks of as bushfire.
My heart is heavy for those in Vic that have lost loved ones and homes and I fear that the toll will rise. All those in affected areas are being urged to register with the Red Cross so that they can be accounted for.
Rayedish – conditions sound similar to what happened in the big fires Canberra few years ago. Quite a bit came out of the inquests afterwards about house design changes for fire safety.
LeftyE @ 52 – perhaps people shouldn’t be rebuilding in those areas. With changing climate it may not be possible to make it sufficiently safe.
rayedish – ‘firestorm’ ??
As in Dresden WWII (conventional incendiary bombing); Canberra firestorm?; other wildfires?
I don’t think you need atomic weapons to initiate these conditions.
Ambi and rayedish, here’s a link which quotes the academic in question, and he does use the Dresden comparison.
Katz
apologies for being dispassionate about your report, but that is fascinating. The window glass didn’t melt (being transparent) but the bottles did. The sill eventually caught fire.
House eesign: is it possible to anticipate the direction the fire will arrive from? If not, do we need metal shutters on the outside of every window?
thanks Paul Norton
“Brian, after forested areas of Nathan Campus of Griffith University caught fire twice in two years (incinerating 35 cars and almost the entire campus on the second occasion) the University and Brisbane City Council adopted a fire management strategy for Toohey Forest based on controlled mosaic burning, which basically involved setting low intensity fires in discrete patches on a staggered basis mimicking the fire history of the forest, much as you describe in your first par.”
Wow, thanks Paul. I live just a few streets way from that forest in tgndi. I may owe you my house!