I mentioned on the Good Morning thread last night (my time - Saturday morning for you guys) that 15 people had been killed in Victoria, with the numbers possibly being as high as 40.
We saw the news this morning (Sunday). The problem has been that the fires are really severe. I remember as a kid being told that a bad bushfire can travel faster than an express train - but since then I've seen fires travel faster. The '94 fires just before difficult child 3 was born, were of a terrifying scale previously unheard of. But from what I saw on TV this morning - yesterday's fires in Victoria are equally as bad. If you see it on your TV, just remember this - the fires being filmed are not the worst. The fires are small enough to be filmed. The worst areas are so bad that the fire crews can't get in and neither can the media. Anyone in the area is on the run, nobody has time to stand and film, when they're running for their lives.
They now know that 25 people are confirmed dead, including some children. They just haven't been able to get out in time, the entire area has been baked dry over the past few weeks, including some really intense record-breaking temperatures. The vegetation is mostly as flammable as gunpowder soaked in petrol.
The reports are of towns hit by the fires and gone in a couple of minutes. Where towns have been cut off from even emergency services, nobody has heard from them or been abe to get in to find out what has happened. Firefighting tanker choppers have done what they could, but that is where they fear the death toll could be higher. They just won't know until they get the fire crews in there - did the fires miss the towns, or did they wipe out the towns? The choppers can see damage, but did the owners get out safely or not? And if so, where did they go? The feared death toll sounds to me like an estimate based on statistics - if we have already had fires hit X number of villages with Y death toll, and we know another Z villages have been hit by fires, then the death toll could be as high as Y(X + Z)/X.
I mention fires deliberately lit - they have caught a few people who deliberately lit a fire trying to cause a problem. But there have been others, totally thoughtless, who threw cigarette butts out the window. One kid on the news this morning reported seeing this and then a fire start, while he and his family were trying to save their home (I think they lost it). Someone on the news said that in California, it is illegal to light acigarette during a total fire ban in a high risk area. It certianly used to be social rule here. I remember an old Marlboro ad which showed a man riding through a wheatfield lighting a cigarette - my parents were highly scoffing of that ad because they said no farmer in his right mind would light up in the middle of a wheatfield ready for harvest. Asking for trouble. There are no ashtrays on a horse.
The Australia in which I grew up, taught these things as common sense. But we've had such an influx of immigrants over the last few decades and with an increase in safety and hazard reduction, people forget and get complacent. And the newer Aussies just don't realise, if they haven't grown up with a healthy fear of fire. Or an unhealthy fear, in husband's case.
Victoria was very much bushranger country a hundred years ago and more, because it is so mountainous and isolated. It makes backburning a problem and in a crisis, it makes firefighting also very difficult.
Only a year ago, there were again very bad fires through Victoria, they just couldn't put them out until they burned out. Now they're saying this could be worse then the Ash Wednesday fires
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_Wednesday_fires
The scary thing is - they prepared for this, they put all the precuations in place that they could. Ash Wednesday was so bad because we were caught by surprise and people made mistakes.
Now to us in NSW. Again, we're likely to be safe here. In our part of Sydney the temperatures won't get above 35 C today (95 F). However, in the western suburbs of Sydney it's going to go over 45 C (113 F). In NSW our National Parks & Wildlife people have been burning off through winter, keeping the fuel load down. This hasn't always been possible in Victoria, where they are having so much trouble now.
Currently there is only one fire in Sydney's outskirts (deliberately lit on Friday sometime). They're still fighting it but it's mostly in bushland now. But today could be bad.
I just checked the Bureau of Meteorology website for the current weather warning - they haven't updated it, it still has Saturday's warnings up.
"Warning summary
A Fire Weather Warning and Total Fire Ban for today. Refer to
www.bom.gov.au for latest warnings and Rural Fire Service Total Fire Ban information.
A Health Alert for poor air quality has been issued by the NSW Department of Health. For more information see:
http://www.bom.gov.au/catalogue/warnings/air-pollution.shtml
Forecast for Sunday
Fine. Sunny. Very hot in the west. Freshening north to northeast winds ahead of a late southerly change.
Precis: Sunny. Late southerly change.
Fire danger: Very High to Extreme."
As I said, we'll be fine here. Amazingly, it's not even too hot here. We've got the house battened down, husband has been lopping off dead Cabbage Tree Palm fronds and stuffing them in the bin. Those palm fronds are brilliant as kindling, I have to be careful to only use a few strands from a single leaf to start a fire in the pizza oven, or I risk burning out the pizza oven. You can look at the leaves and the stems, and see the gleam on them like varnish. As they heat up in a fire you can see this natural varnish melt and catch fire. Scary, to have several large specimens of this growing wild beside the house.
We're about to go and collect mother in law to come and sit in our house. Even though she has air conditioning, her house heats up too much. Ours should stay cool today, plus we'll got for a swim if it gets too hot here. husband has hung a tarpaulin outside our bathroom wall of glass, to shield it from the western sun. The budgies aren't happy - they like the picture window in there and now it's dark blue in their favourite room. I can hear them scolding.
Watching tis on the news this morning - it's scary. difficult child 3 has no memory of the bad fires of course, it was before he was born. He's seen fires here, but they were nothing by comparison. Even husband - he wasn't here that day, he was at work. He had to watch from across the water when it looked really bad. We were right in it but too close to really see it or smell it (sounds stupid, I know). Today is a weekend - that's when the risk of arson climbs through the roof. But it's also when people are at home and better able to fight the fires. Our villages here are better protected than most, but we only survived '94 due to luck. Today nobody should go for a bushwalk, it's advised against. You could be out on the headland with nowhere to go to get away from a fire, and nobody knowing you're there. At the campsite last night, where difficult child 1 & daughter in law are staying, there were gas barbecues under cover for people to cook on safely. No fires permitted. Right where the kids' tents are, is a common spot for fires to start (from camper's fires out of control). If a fire started there, the kids would be in trouble trying to bug out fast. Too far from the lagoon, they'd have to take shelter in the mangrove swamp. They'll be packing up there now, they need to check out by midday.
I'll update here as there is news, a few hours and we'll know more.
Marg
