Ferocious fires in Australia (PERSONAL)

Bush in most english-speaking countries is low vegetation - the synonyms being shrub, brush or scrub - nothing more than 10 or 15 ft (3 to 5m) in height. So when Americans read of bushfires in Australia they usually think of small stuff burning. Bush, brush. They think of California coast "bRushfires" with the R. Wikipedia obviously written by an American or an Englishman follows this misleading usage. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfire

In Australian english the term "the bush" encompasses anything rural. Sydney's classic insult to other multi-million cities is encompassed by the description of Australia as "Sydney or the bush."

Serious Australian "bushfires" are real forest fires to use the American term, and they have an extraordinary fury to them in hot dry summers in windy conditions because of the volatile sap of eucalypt leaves. The foliage of trees can literally explode, the fire racing through the treetops shooting and scattering embers for hundreds of feet. Many flora in Australia only germinate when the seeds are roasted, so fires are natural to this environment. Lightning strikes start most of them. The roots and trunks of the most trees survive all but the worst infernos.

Some bushfires however they don't survive.

In my time in Melbourne everyone was aware of bushfires that had raged in the forests due east of Melbourne on Jan 13, 1939, a day that got dubbed Black Friday. Those fires killed thousands of mature Mountain Ash gumtrees (E. Regnans) leaving white ghosts of dead trunks up to 300ft (90m) height and 10ft (3m) diameter all through the bush of the Dandenong Ranges. Wikipedia guys: ozzie 'bush'  encompasses trees rivaling redwoods of the Sierra Nevadas.

The worst devastation at the weekend was in small settlements on, or just beyond the north and northeast fringe of the Melbourne metro area - approx 80km (50 miles) out from the center. Over a hundred people have died and a thousand houses have been destroyed according to local reports. Google "The Age Melbourne" or "The Australian" (a newspaper that paid me a salary for six years).

I've only experienced an Australian bushfire up close as an amateur firefighter in the neighboring state of New South Wales about 25 miles (40km) north of Canberra, the national capital.  The two most exciting episodes in my life have been fighting that relatively mild bushfire, and experiencing a nighttime mortar attack and followup assault by a North Vietnamese regiment with a company of South Vietnamese rangers in the Parrots Beak area of Cambodia toward the end of the Vietnam war. In Cambodia we had no US air cover but fortunately the Rangers were terrific fighters and although outnumbered they routed the NVA in an immediate counterattack. It was like a bushfire that lost.

A bushfire is a moving inferno and fighting it and escaping it a matter of trying to predict its movement from the lay of the land (it goes faster uphill) and the continuity of volatile tree top, but most of all the vicissitudes of wind. You fight it with a chainsaw by trying to break the continuity of treetop before it arrives, and by standing by buildings with water and beaters to extinguish flying embers - at least in milder fires. And your best escape from a bushfire is a big heavy 4-wheel drive like a Toyota Land Cruiser 40 series I had then, with big wheels, high clearance and a heavy bumper.

The fire I fought was enough to get the adrenalin moving but nothing like this weekend's blazes. I don't remember much about the wind and while it was hot and dry, the heat wasn't unseasonal.

Most Australian houses outside the city have metal roofs which gives them a fighting chance chance of survival as compared to so much of California which is roofed with dopey Burn-Me-Please-I'm-Insured asphalt shingles.  But the fires at the weekend seem to have been much wilder and hotter than more normal Australian bushfires with radiation so intense people are forced inside the house, and the interiors of houses and vehicles ignite from pure radiant heat or from the flurry of embers. I guess the intensity of a fire is related to the speed of combustion and to the extent that is oxygen-constrained the fire burns hotter the faster the wind is supplying oxygen - a blast furnace like effect.

I lived in Melbourne Australia from about age 10 to 24 (1950 to 1964). Family and friends drew me back for visits many times after that. I remember Melbourne temperatures in one of two summers reaching 110F (43C), and the skies dusty, and oven hot "northerlies". Those were rare high temperatures, the more normal highs for a summer being something like 104F (40C). The latitude of Melbourne (37S) makes it generally more mild in climate than Sydney or Brisbane with lower average temperatures, less humidity, and pleasant summer nights, not unlike northern California or southeast Virginia (San Francisco is exactly the same latitude N as Melbourne is south, while on the east coast the equivalent cities are Richmond or Norfolk VA.)

But Melbourne in the far south of the country is more vulnerable than lower latitude east coast centers like Sydney and Brisbane to regular summer winds out of the hot interior of the country, occasions on which prevailing northerly winds from the desert and arid interior reach way down the southern most part of the mainland. North and northwest of Melbourne there is nothing you'd call more than small hills for a thousand miles into the continent's central desert. Those northerly winds out of the desert bring the 100F+ days (38C+) with great regularity each summer to Melbourne and the occasional high in the high 100sF (42C).

This weekend in Melbourne the temperature reached a high of 46.4C (115.5F) and those desert-hot winds were gusting to 100km/hr (60mph). A midafternoon change in the wind caught many by surprise with unexpected flanking attacks. People were killed in their houses, outside their houses, in their cars trying to escape. Hundreds are suffering awful burns and many are traumatized by the horror of the inferno and the loss of their homes, pets and possessions.

In the aftermath there's talk of some of the blazes being madmade. It wouldn't be surprising if some were defensive "backburns" gone awry, some arsons. And there will always be questions of what could have been done to lessen the disaster. The danger of bushfires won't get people to avoid living in the rural fringe of Australian cities any more than hurricanes will stop people living in Florida. Unltimately  it's a risk people take living in an occasionally and unpredictably deadly environment.

The loss of 150 or so people in Australia with 20m population is of the same magnitude as America's losses at the hands of Al Qaida on 9/11/2001.

While shocking the number of people hurt in these events pales into insignificance beside the danger of manmade malice - such as from religious fanatics armed with nukes from Iran or North Korea.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25026912-2702,00.html

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25026913-5018722,00.html

http://www.theage.com.au/interactive/2009/national/bushfires/

Peter Samuel

TOLLROADSnews 2009-02-08