Bushfires in Victoria

[Solauren]

Wow.

This is going to be absolutely devestating. I mean, you expect to see this kind of damage from a war or something...

Fortunately, the death count stays in the low hundreds (ghoulish sounding, I know), but it could get much, much, worse.

And HOLY SHIT to that picture of the car with the metalled metal under it. A fire using common organic materials did that?!?!

Wow.

[CJvR]

Death toll at 166.

I don't get it!
It isn't as if a wing of B52 fly over and unload a full load of napalm, how can a stinking brushfire kill over 160 people!?

[Kanastrous]

Huge-acreage, fast-moving fire sweeps over roads and settlements more rapidly than people can evade it.

[weemadando]

Yeah, these fires have been exceptionally bad - the damage and human cost has been phenomenal.

Last I heard (again courtesy of ABC News Breakfast) was 173 dead and the police are now working through Kinglake which was all but destroyed by the fire. And from the reports given by a few locals there it sounds like a lot of the town didn't get out in time. So that alone could send the death toll skywards.

It's un-fucking-believable just how bad this has been.

[Big Orange]

I have a horrible feeling the ultimate death toll will be at least 500.

[weemadando]

Huge-acreage, fast-moving fire sweeps over roads and settlements more rapidly than people can evade it.

And as I mentioned a lot of people keep on underestimating fires, year after year after year. This time, combine the usual underestimations by a lot of folks with a rampaging super-fire and you get this kind of outcome where even the people who did get out in time still got overtaken by the fire on occasions.

[Elfdart]

Because huge sections of Australia are covered in dry brush and there's nowhere to hide from such enormous fires. Someone driving along a country road where dry grass is waist-high could easily be killed by such a fire and the fuel in his gas tank will only feed the fires that much more.

California is much smaller that Oz in land area and has almost twice as many people, yet they often have a hard time fighting wildfires and people still get killed in them. California also has the US Army, National Guard troops, and firefighters from other states who can help out.

[weemadando]

Because huge sections of Australia are covered in dry brush and there's nowhere to hide from such enormous fires. Someone driving along a country road where dry grass is waist-high could easily be killed by such a fire and the fuel in his gas tank will only feed the fires that much more.

California is much smaller that Oz in land area and has almost twice as many people, yet they often have a hard time fighting wildfires and people still get killed in them. California also has the US Army, National Guard troops, and firefighters from other states who can help out.

Yeah, the once in a lifetime conditions haven't helped: no rain in more than a month for the affected areas on the back of 10 years of drought, add to this record high temperatures and extreme winds and you have one ready-to-go blast furnace.

[Kanastrous]

How wide a firebreak would you need around a town, if equipment was available to cut it?

[weemadando]

Death toll at 166.

I don't get it!
It isn't as if a wing of B52 fly over and unload a full load of napalm, how can a stinking brushfire kill over 160 people!?

Pro-tip: This ain't a goddamn brushfire.

[weemadando]

How wide a firebreak would you need around a town, if equipment was available to cut it?

I'm by no means an authority on this, but most firebreaks which I've seen are between 5 and 15 metres wide. But with these kind of conditions you'd need more, as the intense heat and wind might spark the other side. And anyway - the major threat with fires is also embers which can float for quite a distance before setting down to spark another location, so breaks can't even really defend against that.

Really, for fires of this severity - there's bugger all that really could be done.

Though, they've announced a Royal Commission will be held into it, to determine exactly what [potentially] went wrong and how to fix it. Most concerning on that front is the fact that a lot of towns are now saying that they never received notice or warnings that there was a fire in their area or heading their direction.

[Elfdart]

If winds are blowing (like the Santa Anna winds in CA) then embers can fly up to a mile or more, so fire breaks still might not stop it. Backfires could just add to the problem.

[thejester]

One of our community on HPCA posted some intersting comments on this from the scene. I'll get his permission to cross-post, but until then, they can be found HERE

Summed it up beautifully.

The reason so many people have died is the speed of the fires, their intensity and people panicking. Even if you're not properly prepared to fight (and unless you've cleared out around your house, have your own water supply, pump and generator you're not) you do better to stay in your house and wait until the main fire front has passed. Get in a car and the fire will almost certainly catch-up to you.

A similar thing happened in Canberra a few years ago, IIRC. An enormous front came out of a national park, and just smashed into a suburb. Nothing could have been done - it was simply too large, too intense. Sounds like the change on Saturday created a similar situation.

[Edi]

A similar thing happened in Canberra a few years ago, IIRC. An enormous front came out of a national park, and just smashed into a suburb. Nothing could have been done - it was simply too large, too intense. Sounds like the change on Saturday created a similar situation.

I have a friend whose family lived through that. Pretty goddamn hair-raising stuff the stories she told about it. The fire was stopped (or burnt out) right across the street from them.

[Isolder74]

Death toll at 166.

I don't get it!
It isn't as if a wing of B52 fly over and unload a full load of napalm, how can a stinking brushfire kill over 160 people!?

I take it you have no idea what a firestorm is. They are nothing to poke fun at. They move fast and can cause death very quickly. You might remember the Massive fires in Yellowstone where a similar fire jumped the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone? They are very hard to predict and in a sparse area where it's hard to contact people they can get caught in it before word can get to them to get out.

If the only road out is blocked by the fire...you get the idea.

[thejester]

Brumby announces worse to come, Royal Commission.

Victorian Premier John Brumby has warned that the bushfire emergency in his state will get worse before it gets better.

Mr Brumby told ABC1's 7.30 Report that there are still fires that are not contained.

"We've still got fires that are not contained," he said.

"The fires are close to Melbourne, the fires are at Beechworth, the fires at Churchill - these are still not contained.

"There is a huge effort to get them under control. And, tragically, we will have more deaths, later this week. We now have 130 confirmed deaths."

Mr Brumby also linked the fires to global warming.

"There's clear evidence now that the climate is becoming more extreme," he said.

Earlier on Monday Mr Brumby confirmed there would be a Royal Commission into the weekend's bushfires.

The Commission's terms of references will be wide and will include all aspects of the Government's bushfire strategy and a review of the Government's policy to allow people to defend their properties.

Many of those killed died protecting their homes.

Mr Brumby said no stone would be left unturned.

"We want to make sure that every single issue, every single factor, everything in relation to the horrific weekend, to the horrific fires on Saturday is investigated and uncovered," he said.

"Whatever aspect of government policy, whatever aspect of people's own practice in terms of their fire plans, whatever recommendations are needed, to be put in place in the future to be sure that this disaster will never ever occur again," he said.

"The stay or go policy, I think, will also be reviewed as part of that. And what we want to do is, you know, learn the lessons."

The bushfire death toll currently stands at at least 166 people.

More than 700 homes have been destroyed.

The Government will announce a timeline for the inquiry later in the week.

ABC's also got a map up that shows the current location of the fires.

[Kanastrous]

you do better to stay in your house and wait until the main fire front has passed. Get in a car and the fire will almost certainly catch-up to you.

This seems counter-intuitive. You're safer in an inflammable stationary house, than in a car traveling away from the flame front?

[thejester]

Before this summer at least, it had been shown that the majority of bushfires death came from people fleeing at the last minute. Once a fire starts spotting it moves incredibly fast; you're almost certain not to outrun it and in the smoke and haze of a fire there's no guarantee you are actually moving away from it. And in your car your in a an object that has a bloody tank of petrol sitting in it.

If you're in your house...it's not like you're safe but as I understand it you've got abetter chance. Houses take a while to burn down, certainly longer than a car, and in that time the main fire front will hopefully pass. There was a Fairfax video of a guy relating such an experience, I'll try and dig it up. Essentially he, his children and his girlfriend sheltered in their house in Marysville. Place became untenable - windows exploding inwards from the heat and (presumably) his LPG bottles as well - but he'd been able to fill his bath with water. They soaked towels and sheets in the water and ran for about a km to another house that was being defended...that bloke ran out of water so they had to shift again to another house about 500m away that was again being defended and were able to stay there. One of his daughters was a severe asthmatic as well. The scenes he described were pretty hideous - the whole town was aflame - but the fact they were able to run 1.5 km safely suggest the front had passed.

Flip side of that are stories of people dying in houses. It's not a guarantee of safety and there's a lot of variables - type of house, CFA presence, intensity of the fire - but the fact it takes longer to burn and will protect you from the radiant heat probably makes it the safer option.

EDIT: Not a video but this article makes the point:

Senior Constable Wood had a moment of fear for his own family. He was on duty at the Kinglake police station and his wife and children were at home in St Andrews. She called and asked him to come home, saying: "I'm looking out the kitchen window and there are flames out the window."

"I couldn't go. I couldn't get down the mountain," he recalls. "Anyway, when you see flames it's too late to do a runner. That's what happened with a lot of the people here."

The road out of Kinglake is still littered with empty, twisted cars. Some have collided head on and others were in multi-car pile-ups. Senior Constable Wood knows why — he was on that road, answering a call for help, when the smoke of the fire front first hit. He turned to go back into Kinglake and found himself blind. "It went pitch black, darker than the darkest of nights. There were cars going everywhere. There was sheer panic," he said.

[Broomstick]

How wide a firebreak would you need around a town, if equipment was available to cut it?

Kilometers.

Seriously. A lot depends on winds and atmospheric conditions, but remember that in a firestorm the fire itself affects to local atmosphere. The superheated air draws air in form around the fire, creating extreme turbulence and tornado-like "firewhirls" - this also accounts for why you'll occasionally see anomalous bare patches or areas less severely scorched, as well as spots that are more severely burned.

The worst US brushfire firestorm was the 1871 Peshtigo fire, that killed somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people and jumped the Green Bay of Wisconsin more than once. The Green Bay is 16 to 31 km wide, so even at the narrowest area that's still a considerable jump. The Peshtigo fire wasn't much noted at the time, as at the same time the city of Chicago was also burning down. The Chicago Fire was also a firestorm - there, ceramic plates were fused together by the temperature, iron nails in hardware stores welded together, and the steel rail lines twisted and partially melted in the Loop area, requiring their replacement. Other notable firestorms have produced similar heat, but nothing says "hot" quite like a stack of fused pottery or a lump that used to be a box of nails or a pile of coins - the Chicago Historical Society exhibit on the 1871 fire features such items.

Anyhow - someone please tell me Melbourne is not danger... towns being wiped out is terrible enough, but I would really hate to see this hit a major population center.

[thejester]

No, it's not in danger. Some of the outermost suburbs of greater Melbourne had fires on Saturday and there's a fires up in the catchment areas but any significant population concentrations are safe.

[Kanastrous]

The superheated air draws air in form around the fire, creating extreme turbulence and tornado-like "firewhirls" - this also accounts for why you'll occasionally see anomalous bare patches or areas less severely scorched, as well as spots that are more severely burned.

I've seen small-scale examples at first-hand, during the Griffith Park fire last year. Very impressive.

[bobnik]

Part of the trouble on the Saturday was that there was a 90 degree wind shift. On flat terrain at least, a busfire will develop in a long triangle shape, with the shorter side being the fire front and the long sides being the flanks. The flanks burn reasonably slowly because the wind is not direcyly behind them. When the wind shifted, one of those long flanks became the new front, and that was it.

I heard a bloke on the radio talking about the preparations for the weekend, and he said "we prepared for a king tide and got a tsunami." I'll see if I can dig up the reference

Some good news:
Elderly couple in Churhill survive

Qld flood victims donate to Vic bushfire victims

[tim31]

Qld flood victims donate to Vic bushfire victims

*choke*

+1 faith in humanity.

[Stuart]

Part of the trouble on the Saturday was that there was a 90 degree wind shift. On flat terrain at least, a busfire will develop in a long triangle shape, with the shorter side being the fire front and the long sides being the flanks. The flanks burn reasonably slowly because the wind is not direcyly behind them. When the wind shifted, one of those long flanks became the new front, and that was it.

According to a friend of mine who is in the center of the fire area the main problem was that the speed of advance of the fire outran the communications system. Apparently the fire front was advancing at 80 kph with spot fires starting up to 20 km ahead of the main fire front.

[weemadando]

There is a plus side to all this - it could fix the "economic downturn" in Australia by creating a massive boom in the construction and related trades industries for the next few years due to the PMs pledge to rebuild everything.