Horrendous Australian Wildfires

[MattKellett]

After watching a report on the wildfires in Australia - 170 dead and counting, likely due to many cases of arson.

I wanted our friends in Australia to know that we hope you and your families are safe and hope that the fires will be under control soon.

[Jim Bremner]

One of my vendors is over there. He says that it's just terrible. Sad stuff indeed.

Their Prime Minister has said something to the effect that asrsonist are guilty of mass murder!

[TonyK]

I'm sure all the Aus-Pelicans appreciate your kind thoughts Matt.

Fortunately enough I'm along way from the fires and have not yet been personally affected. It is truly devastating though; whole towns (and many of the families that lived there!) have been completely wiped off the map.

It's bitterly ironic that there are also massive monsoonal floods in far north Queensland at the same time!

Dorothea Mackellar wrote a poem titled "My Country". The second verse goes like this:

"I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and terror,
The wide brown land for me."

That just about sums it up really.

[pwd72s]

Me too...Lisa and hers are in Victoria, outside of Melbourn. Hope they are okay!

[HardDrive]

Terrible tragedy.

Always found Aussies to be very welcoming and open hearted folk. My thoughts are with you.

[imcarthur]

I got a note from my son in Melbourne.

"It is not fun. Topped out at 46.4, a new record. The wind is so hot is feels like it is melting your eyes. The whole state is on fire, and it is quite scary, despite not being in any danger at the moment. Just having to check the site to see if a fire has started near you every hour is scary enough."

He is in the Doncaster East suburb.

Here is the fire map

Ian

[The Gaijin]

Scary how many are dead..

[Rot 911]

Good luck to all you Aussies!

[126coupe]

Sad, I pray they catch those bastards

[Drdogface]

There are reports of a jihad group that is telling all their followers to use arson as a form of terror, first in Aus but also in US and Europe. With 400 fires goin' at once and some already known as arson I would suspect terror groups to be involved. Last summer Ca. had many hundreds of forest fires but, of course, no one in govt. or the media mentioned arson or terror to my knowledge. They all seemed to blame lightning. Yeah, right.

To me it (arson) seems an obvious way for terror groups to 'get the job done'. I wonder how many fires are known by authorities to be terror related but kept secret in fear of public backlash.

Here's the link to the article:

http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/5487/53/

I pray for you all 'Down Under' and hope you catch those plicks....and don't cover up who they are.

[jyl]

hearing from my friends in melbourne
they are ok in downtown
his brother was on roof putting out embers
other brother was 1.5 km from losing home
terrifying fires with intense winds and heat
think australia been in drought for some years now

[lisa_spyder]

Hi,

Paul - we are fine. Our beautiful part of the world is scarred and beaten, but the suffering here due to the Bunyip State Forest Fire almost pales to insignificance...what has happened further afield in Victoria has us all shellshocked and broken-hearted. Sadly we know people who know people who have perished...

Conditions on Saturday were "so perfect" for fire. In fact Saturday's fires have been named "superfires".

As much as I am not a fan of cut and paste...I just can't paraphrase this:





Drought, strong winds and heat combined to produce Victoria fires Article from Herald Sun February 11, 2009 by Alice Coster

CONDITIONS for a perfect firestorm led to Australia's greatest natural disaster at the weekend.

Drought, hurricane-force wind and record temperatures after a record heatwave combined to create Victoria's deadly Black Saturday bushfires.

The University of Melbourne's senior lecturer in fire ecology and management, Kevin Tolhurst, said conditions on Black Saturday were some of the worst the world had seen for a potential outbreak.

He said the fires were so hot the energy they released could have supplied Victoria with electricity for at least two years.

Up to 80,000 kilowatts per metre of heat was expelled as the fires raged on Saturday.

Dr Tolhurst said this equalled about 500 atomic bombs landing on Hiroshima.

"Eyewitness accounts said they didn't see evidence of fire and then all of a sudden they felt the area around them was exploding," Dr Tolhurst said.

The unprecedented bushfires were so savage because of the previous week's heatwave. He said this sapped up the vegetation's moisture, making the land tinder dry.

"What was quite unusual and unique about it was the fires took so readily and developed so quickly. The conditions were so dry the fuel ignited," Dr Tolhurst said.

Department of Sustainability and Environment fire behaviour specialist Peter Billing said spot fires, travelling up to 15km from the fire front, rapidly accelerated the blaze.

"Spotting defeats the control of the fire,' Mr Billing said.

The front then fragmented, creating fingers and tongues of fire rapidly spreading up spurs and gullies.

"Bits and pieces of a very ugly fire will go all over the place," he said. "The original fire, the parent fire, can fragment so it is not a clean edge and you cannot determine exactly where it is."

He said prevailing wind, with gusts reaching hurricane force levels up to 120km/h, initially drove the fire.

"But once it is established it becomes a monster of its own physics," he said.

CSIRO senior fire researcher Andrew Sullivan said Victoria was ideally placed for bad fires because of its climate, vegetation, topography and the phenomenon of hot and dry wind from the continent's centre.

"The conditions on Saturday were typical of bad fire days like Black Friday in 1939 and Ash Wednesday in 1983," Mr Sullivan said.

"Victoria is the perfect spot to have really bad fires."

[pwd72s]

Trees and brush eventually grow back. Lisa, I'm very glad to know that you are safe.

Never thought of the terrorism angle...but I've always thought arsonists should be tried for murder one in the event of any death...

[Bill Douglas]

There have been some really sad stories emerging. One was a guy went to help fight the fire and returned home to find his children dead.

[lisa_spyder]

Even though the weather is really quite cool, there are still new fires starting. There are several urgent threat messages out for many towns right now. If these new fires take hold I would hazard a guess that by the time all the fires are controlled that most of our forest areas will be burnt out.

The losses are already unquantifiable...for God's sake I hope the firefighters are capable of a miracle before the weather warms up again over the weekend.

It was close here - very close. Lots of ash and burnt leaves in our garden. We enacted what fire plan we could given that we live in a town of some 12,000 people. However, spot fires were reported only a couple of streets away from us in a "built-up area". Mike thought I was being a little over-reactive by getting the hoses out, checking gutters etc (I have been through bushfire twice before)...until Billy (9yo) brought in the first totally charred gumleaf from the garden.

To give you an idea - on Saturday the temperature reached nearly 47 degrees celcius here in Warragul, with only 4% humidity and Northwesterly winds gusting to some 60kph...of course the winds were worse in the immediate fire area. Then the wind changed to a Southwesterly and the 2 kilometre front of the Bunyip fire became the flank and the 20 kilometre flank became the fire front...disastrous.

Now there is very real talk of two of the fires joining up - the Bunyip fire and the Yea-Murrindindi fire. Expert opinion is that this will happen in the next three to four days...right when the weather becomes all the more challenging again for the firefighters. These fires at the moment are less than 20 kilometres apart, with the water catchment area for Melbourne bang in the middle (along with a host of towns and little communities)...

[pwd72s]

Lisa, hoping for the best here...do you have an escape plan if need be?

[lisa_spyder]

Escape plan - well we should not be in need of one as the fire is a long way from us now and logic says that it cannot burn again what is had already burnt should the wind change back to blow our way...having said that NOTHING would now surprise me and so my idea of an escape plan is to have the irreplaceable stuff ready to go (kids, pets, papers, photos, stuff that was Mum's and Dad's etc)...the car full of fuel and blankets, water etc loaded.

Everything we have is insured...if it all burns so what...but hopefully that is about as likely now as getting struck by lightning (and no, please don't publish that stat for me - that would not be helpful ).

We WILL be fine...there are a lot of others out there further north and east of us that I am really worried about now.