wilful: “brendon, the hottest days are generally associated with wind, becuae it’s bringing the heat from the desert. Our worst fire weather is always with a northerly. This hasn’t changed.”

Not too sure about that, wilful. I can remember plenty from the mid 30′s to about 40 being windy. But whenever it is a real stinker its normally still with sometimes if you are lucky a a cooling breeze in the late afternoon.

Armagny, there is absolutely no chance that any of those black saturday fires could have been meaningfully controlled, within about 15 minutes of ignition. To attempt to do so merely kills firefighters. As for a professional firefighting force, we do have one, there are over 1000 DSE staff dedicated to fire management, and I think about 800 paid professional CFA firefighters. If you doubled or tripled the size of this force (is that what you’re suggesting?), then for the overwhelming majority of the time you’d be wasting a godawful amount of money, and for the critical periods they’d still be inadequate. Nothing, repeat nothing, can stop a bushfire with the wind behind it.

Billie: Really as soon as the CFA or DSE identify a fire, they should plot its path, evaluate its intensity and evacuate people in its path or put fire fighters in to control the fire.

Good idea. In fact, that’s pretty much exactly what happens. First attack on small fires is highly successful, more than 95% of fires are put out at ten hectares or less. The reason you may not know that is because success isn’t very newsworthy. The only thing that doesn’t really happen is evacuations. No power to do so, and a belief (which is being tested) that people survive in houses, and die on roads.

Elvis or whatever it was emptied Birdsland lake (Belgrave) last Feb in one day. Nothing left but mud.

So I guess, those are the days, because they are pretty rare.

Beer talk? Yes, I suppose. But anyone you mention it to who is old enough will immediately say “Thats right!”….thats a lot of beer. I worked outdoors for 30 years and I can never remember a day over 40 that was windy and the one thing that struck me on black saturday was that it was windy during the heat of the day.

I can’t say I agree about hot days always being still.

But none of us have the data so its all beer talk.