It’s not like their tiny water tank was going to stop what was coming.
A picture from our recent bushfires.
Scary as hell!!!
Wow… that’s horrendous! I can’t believe the height of the flames! And these fires were intentionally set, huh?
As for the firefighters, no reason to be foolhardy in that case.
I guess the fires can actually move FASTER than even cars, and some people were burned to death trying to drive away…:shock:
I think you’re referring to the guys dying in their cars. That’s usually the ones that got stuck in traffic jams or things like that.
Though the fires can get very fast - always depends on the wind and the ground.
As for the picture: That’s a ridiculously high wall of smoke and fire. A real nightmare.
Also, did anybody notice the slight watermark/reflection at the top of the image, in the middle of the smoke?
Actually I’m talking about (as the news story portrayed it) people who stayed until the last minute and then jumped in their cars when the fires were about to consume their houses.
Only one of the four or five (a couple merged) major fires causing many deaths has been identified as arson. A second one is being investigated. The others appear to have been from unintentional causes like falling power lines and lightning strikes.
At least this time, not that it’s exactly good news, we’ve only lost one firefighter, and stupidly from a falling tree branch after the fire, unlike many deaths during the last big fires in the early 1980s where crews were trapped and burnt to death. His loss is doubly sad, because he came down here from another state to repay the effort our state’s crews made in his patch a few years back.
Crew training and safety had improved a lot since the last big fires, and they’ve been trained to save themselves first. Not that you’d know it from some of the truly heroic efforts they make to save lives and property by putting their own lives at risk. And almost all of them are unpaid volunteers from the community.
Christ knows what some of them did and saw. The 18 year old son of friends of ours, who is a mate of my 18 year old son, was one of the volunteer firefighters who were in the thick of it in one of the worst spots where many lives were lost. He’s won’t talk about it. He’s changed, and retreated into himself. We hope he finds himself again but, like battle, it’s probably one of those things that nobody can understand unless they’ve experienced it.
Bushfires can in some instances move faster than cars, such as when during the recent fires they were being propelled by 100 kmh + plus winds which throw embers ahead of the fire and cause fresh fires. Particularly dangerous when the fire moves straight ahead before the wind while the cars have to negotiate twisting roads at lower speeds, so the cars are always going to be overtaken.
Most of the deaths in cars probably occurred because people couldn’t see where they were going in the dense smoke and ran off the road or into roadside objects; or into other cars; or into trees which fell across the road because of the fire and because our long years of drought have weakened the trees’ hold on the land anyway.
The first and second images are the same scene from the recent bushfires, from different angles. The first one looks like they had nowhere to go, but in the second it’s clear that there was ample space to get around on the right. If they could have seen it. And survived.
It’s because print on the back of the page of the magazine photo came through. Even our worst commercial advertisers wouldn’t put a banner up there.
Here’s the full image from a digital source, without any distracting print etc.
And another fire, with the fire a long way further back than it might look. Scale it off the trees in the background.
That is what is most likely to get you killed on the road if you’re trying to escape your burning home.
The rules are that you leave early in the morning on high fire risk days when roads and vision are clear or if you’re still home and you can see flames then you stay because you won’t get out. Easy to say, but hard to do, especially in the latter case. But a lot of people have become more cautious now since the last fires, as in this case which is happening as I write.
Bushfire edges closer to Warburton
Firefighters battle the 80,000 hectare Kilmore East-Murrindindi fire
Warburton, in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, is on alert as firefighters battle a huge fire nearby.
A wind change this afternoon could push the 80,000 hectare Kilmore East-Murrindindi fire towards Warburton.
Many residents have left the town but some have stayed to defend homes and businesses.
Kevin Monk of the Department of Sustainability and Environment says if people have not already left, they should stay and avoid the roads.
“There’ll be tankers going up and down the road. The best thing is to put into effect their plan - just monitor the radio and just listen to any messages that might come out,” he said.
The fire is about four to six kilometres from the town.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/02/23/2499033.htm
The problem with the recent fires was that they moved so fast that many people had no warning. Everything was fine one minute and a few minutes later a fire crested a hill and was bearing down on them.
On the day the fires started I was driving out of the metropolitan area to a semi-rural area towards what turned out to be the start of the main fire. I heard radio reports about it and could see that the smoke plume was at least twenty miles away, so it was no threat to me where I was going in the mid-afternoon. A few hours later it had crossed an incredible amount of country and was burning people out. I still find it hard to believe that any fire can move that quickly. So do a lot of other people.
The “Kilmore East-Murrindindi” fire mentioned in the article above started as the one that I didn’t think was too bad as I drove towards it in its first hour or two a couple of Saturdays ago, and now its Monday.
It grew rapidly into the biggest killer fire we’ve ever had. It’s been burning over a fortnight and marching across a lot of land, although a lot slower after the first few days.
I read an article by a fire scientist who said that by using a range of factors such as temperature, dryness of vegetation, humidity (or lack of it), wind and so on it is possible to construct an accurate index of fire risk for a given day. An index of 60 or more pretty much guarantees dangerous fires which cannot be controlled. The index on the day our fires started was over 200. There’s not much anyone can do in such circumstances, and they couldn’t.
WHat the HELL is that!..that looks more like Armagedon than an Australian Bush Fire. My God! I can’t believe what I am seeing!! Thank God R.S. is safe!
I’m sorry to hear that. I don’t often think about these types of people (firefighters, police, emergency responders, etc.) getting ptsd but I’m sure quite a lot of them do. I hope things work out for him too.
From this view…it looks like this area is in the saddle and upsloap of the terrain. The worst place to be in a brush fire.
Its amazing how fast fire moves up hill, combined with the wind carrying embers and starting spot fires. While driving visibility can turn from good to totally blind in seconds…then the smoke starves the car engine of oxygen and it stalls. Sad very sad.
The sad fact is nobody, not even the CFA or experienced ‘Firies’ could comprehend what the forecast conditions meant in reality. Quite simply this country has never experienced conditions like this.
The speed of the fires cannot be under estimated whether it be on the ground or through the crown of the trees.
digger
That is understood by the fire-savvy people here, although there are some or many people in bushfire risk areas who aren’t too fire savvy. A lot of these areas are in the bush half an hour to an hour beyond the metropolitan limits where city people with limited finances can afford a home they can’t buy in the suburbs, but they have no bush knowledge and even if they do they often don’t have the money to do what is necessary to protect their homes.
Not that it mattered all that much in these fires, as the best prepared home owners sometimes died carrying out a sound fire plan.
The recent / current fires were / are beyond anything that even fire savvy people could handle. I know of people who were deeply bush and fire wise and prepared but who were caught unawares and caught by fire before they had a chance to put their fire plan into action.
Some of them died trying to implement their previously sound fire plan. I had a slightly teary session today with someone I work with who knows far too many of the people who died, and the actual or feared circumstances of their deaths.
Our worst fires, the major ones of which are still burning three weeks after they started, broke a lot of the rules because the unusual heat of the day, the dryness of the vegetation after years of drought and our worst hot dry summer, and the strength of the wind gave it unprecedented speed.
These conditions were ably aided by guaranteed worst fire conditions created by the political fuckwits who are Greenies or, more often, who are captive to the well-meaning (as ?Oscar Wilde? said: He said of him the worst you can say of any man: He meant well.) Greenies so that, unlike years ago when we knew how to and annually did reduce risk by reducing fuel, now there is no burning off before the fire season and all the forest litter is left on the forest floor and roadside to ensure the best fire, plus all the firebreaks and fire access roads have been allowed to grow over at the behest of the fucking Greenies to protect the fucking trees.
Yeah, that has worked a fucking treat for the fucking tree lovers, who now have no trees at all over hundreds of thousands of acres because the dumb shits put their stupid city wanker emotional connection with ‘the land’ and ‘the trees’ above the realities of living in and on it, and put preserving trees at the top of their list of bearded, dreadlocked, dole-bludging list of priorities, where preserving people’s lives came last. As, curiously enough and spectacularly ineffectively, did saving the trees in a bushfire on their fuckwit ignoramus plans for preserving the bush. Not what they intended, but that’s what they achieved. Dumb fucks.
Oddly enough, most of these aresholes don’t live in bushfire prone areas, but they are prepared to fight other people’s lives to the limit to save those areas.
So here is what these great protectors of trees have wrought upon a hundred or two acres, which is multiplied by thousands into the hundreds of thousands of acres which would still be largely treed if these well-meaning city arseholes accepted fire science instead of their new age spiritual connection with land that they don’t understand in the first place.
Meanwhile the local councils issue fire hazard notices of bureaucratic satisfaction and little or no practical effect, such as at my beach shack where I got my annual notice to cut grass (about six weeks before I would have done it to get the best reduction in fuel :rolleyes:) when there are two bloody great cypress trees at the front which will burn a treat if a few embers get into them in the right conditions.
So Know I have heard it all!..Even in Australia after the vicious fire that scorched the entire island from ash to cinder, there are reports of people trying to rip off others in bogus charity donations. Now I have seen it all. This is exactly why you cant trust anyone. Not even an Australian!..There not all that nice as some people we may know from Australia that may be on this site (not mentioning any names)
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,25040901-5001028,00.html
A BRISBANE man has been charged with fraud after he allegedly posed as a charity worker collecting money for the victims of Victoria’s fires.
The man allegedly called at homes in suburban Westlake asking for donations, Queensland Police said today.
The 29-year-old was arrested after a resident contacted police.
He has been charged with five counts of fraud and six of attempted fraud and will appear in the Richlands Magistrates Court tomorrow.
This is what was heading for friends of ours in the recent bushfires (but filmed by someone else on a nearby property) but which turned away with a wind change after it had consumed the road a couple of hundred yards in front of our friends’ place.
Note how quickly the fire grows in a couple of minutes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3dPlVvkIZ8
We’ve bought semi-rural land in the same municipality as the one where the film was taken and where the fires did some of their worst damage. We’ll build there this year adjacent to rural land which is a declared bushfire area, from which we’ll get enough embers in a bushfire to set our house alight if it’s undefended.
The numb nuts on the council have planning controls in parts of the municipality which require landowners to plant native trees (which burn like buggery as under heat they give off highly flammable vapours to aid ignition, unlike foreign species) from the road to the house so that the house is enclosed in the forest canopy. :rolleyes:
And the greenies who dominate that council still argue that their crazy environmental policies which increase the fuel load beyond all bloody belief have nothing to do with the damage caused by the fires.
If they want me to plant a death trap around my house they can come out to my place and argue with a couple of feet of roaring chainsaw shoved up their arse.
EDIT: Oh, yes, I should have mentioned that the numb nut greenies are trying to get the declared bushfire area next to our land ‘undeclared’, because as a declared bushfire area people can cut down trees for fire safety purposes without spending a year or two going through planning appeal processes. If there’s one thing that really pisses off a greenie, it’s people being allowed to cut down a tree even if it’s necessary to save their lives and property. (Unless, of course, the tree is cut down by a fucking greenie, such as when they cut down trees to make barricades and tripods and so on when they’re trying to obstruct loggers.)
FURTHER EDIT: It’s worth noting that reports by bushfire experts commissioned by concerned residents some years ago predicted exactly what would and did happen this year. The reports are at the Reports button here, with the second video on the home page demonstrating what a bunch of congenital imbeciles are running the show. http://www.nillumbikratepayers.asn.au/
Must go faster…must go faster!
Four months ago Kinglake and some of its people were being wiped out by a massive bushfire. Now their luck changes. 
Snow falls but mud is now Kinglake’s problem
Carolyn Webb
June 11, 2009MUD is the issue at Kinglake this week. Rain is watering the plants and snow entertaining the children, but the bitter cold is stinging residents still reeling from the February 7 fires.
Snow fell on the burnt-out landscape early yesterday and the temperature plunged to near zero.
Tricia Hill and her three children, aged 15, 14 and 12, whose Keith Street house was destroyed on Black Saturday, are really feeling winter this year. Living in a bus and two caravans, they find that when the microwave and kettle are on at the one time, it turns the heater off. The heater, a small portable wall model, is kept on 24 hours a day, but is so weak you keep your coat on indoors.
A lovely outdoor portable bathroom with toilet was donated by the Northern Metropolitan Institute of TAFE, but you have to run a frigid, muddy gauntlet to it, 10 metres away, if you have to go.
But “the mud is a killer”, Ms Hill said. She has had tan bark spread around the caravans, “but the roads aren’t done, so my children get off the school bus and walk across the road full of slushy mud, cos there’s trucks coming up and down this road every day.”
But Ms Hill, a Kinglake resident for nine years and a CFA volunteer firefighter on Black Saturday, refuses to leave, saying there’s no rental homes around and she needs to supervise workmen who will rebuild. And it’s the children’s home. “They’ve already lost enough, let alone having to move out of the environment that they know, their friends and schools.”
It started snowing about 2am. “Everywhere was white. It was actually quite beautiful.” A Kinglake winter is “always freezing”, she says. “It’s not as cosy. We haven’t got a fire, like we normally would have. This is the first real cold week.”
Katherine Grinlaw, whose Currajong Avenue house was one of the few to survive Black Saturday, and whose foster sons Jake, 3, and Miles, 6, love the snow, marvels that Kinglake has gone “from one extreme to another” — 40-plus-degree heat to near zero — in four months. She reckons half the locals who lost houses are living in caravans; the rest are living with friends or relatives in Melbourne.
The Kinglake temporary village, which will initially house up to 50 residents in units, is not due to open until later this month — not soon enough, say many locals.
Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority spokeswoman Melissa Arch said building the village was a long process that included building water and sewerage facilities and communal kitchens and laundries. Anyone with accommodation concerns can call their case manager or the authority on 1800 240 667.
I was up there a few weeks ago. I’ve seen places burnt by bushfires before, but not like this. The fire was so intense there wasn’t even ash on the ground. Everything was consumed.
I ASK MYSELF, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN Australia?! Every day I read about massive forest fires. Why does the Gov’t not invest more in water and fire prevention to stop this all. If it isn’t California, it’s Australia. If the island can send combat troops and money to stupid Afghanistan and Iraq then why can’t it invest in its own problems more better. I just don’t get it. How can I ever take comfort in my dreams of going to Australia one day for a vacation when all I ever hear about his that the island is on Fire!. Aughh The Humanity of it all!!..I hope Rs is ok…
http://www.torontosun.com/news/world/2009/12/30/12302626.html
PERTH, Australia — Wildfires possibly sparked by fallen power lines roared across a swath of western Australia on Wednesday, razing almost 40 homes and sending hundreds of people fleeing for their lives, officials and witnesses said. At least three people were injured.
Two major blazes burned out of control overnight after breaking out Tuesday afternoon in a wheat and sheep farming district north of the coastal city of Perth, forcing the evacuation of the township of Toodyay and threatening a second town, Badgingarra, farther north.
The two fires scorched a combined total of more than 33,000 acres (13,400 hectares) of forest and farmland before cooler conditions on Wednesday helped hundreds of firefighters contain them.
Western Australia state Premier Colin Barnett declared a natural disaster — freeing up emergency funds for survivors — and praised authorities who battled the blazes.
“There is no doubt they saved lives last night,” Barnett said Wednesday after visiting burned-out homes in Toodyay. “If you saw the destruction, houses were totally destroyed and people were got to safety by the emergency services.”
The state Fire and Emergency Services Authority said at least 37 houses had been razed.
Two firefighters were treated for smoke inhalation and a third was treated for a heat-related illness. Farmers also reported stock being killed. The extent of the damage was still being assessed, said emergency authority spokesman Allen Gale.
Police say falling power lines likely sparked the Toodyay blaze, since there were no other ignition sources in the area.
The managing director of Western Power, Doug Aberle, told Australian Broadcasting Corp. that an independent investigator would head to the scene on Saturday.
“If it’s determined that it’s caused by our negligence, we will be paying compensation as appropriately determined, as we always do,” he said, expressing his sympathy to the victims.
Wildfires are common across Australian during the summer months, but they rarely claim so many homes.
In February, Australia experienced its worst wildfire disaster on record when hundreds of blazes raced across huge parts of southeastern Victoria state, killing 173 people and destroying more than 2,000 homes in a single day.