Bushfires in Australia

[lynnb]

The east coast of Australia is burning, reminiscent of California's experience. This year the fire season started early, in September - by early December 2019 large tracts in four States have been burnt, from Queensland through New South Wales to Victoria and South Australia. The geographic spread of land where there are fire grounds is roughly equivalent to an area the size of the US East Coast/Appalachians around to Texas/Oklahoma. Firefighters from around the world have come to help out. A record drought has left the country tinder dry.

In Sydney where I live, the air is thick with smoke from the fires. Yesterday the sun was a deep red orb through the smoke and visibility was down to about a mile. It's been like this for weeks. The air quality mostly "poor" to "hazardous" with people encouraged to stay indoors with windows closed. Some days are better than others. Cars are covered in fine ash from fires 40 miles away. One fire of eight burning at emergency level west of Sydney has burnt out 250,000 hectares and is still out of control in rugged mountain country. Communities on Sydney's fringes are battling blazes and homes are being lost - so far around 700 in NSW alone. Tragically some lives also lost, mostly from small communities where access gets blocked by the advancing fires.

Nick Moir is an award-winning photojournalist with the Sydney Morning Herald. The SMH is normally behind a paywall, but access is free for stories and pictures related to the current bushfire emergency. Yesterday Nick spent time with firefighters at the Green Wattle Creek fire, on Sydney's south-western fringe. You can see some of his amazing pictures of firefighters battling the blaze here and here. There is further coverage and pictures on the SMH website.

 

[gavinlg]

Those photos are really good, it's not often you see proper photojournalism in Australia's media. I've come home to QLD for the week and it's smoggy everywhere, and the heat is pretty unbearable.

The guys out there fighting the blazes are incredible.

 

[Freakscene]

The Bangala Creek fire in far northern NSW claimed my ancestral home today. I still haven't heard from some relatives, but they should be ok. The whole area was tinder dry and there had been no fire since 2000, so the fuel load was high. The fire has burned >100km2 and is still totally out of control. I am very glad I am far away; I'd be one of those guys in a yellow suit out fighting it if I was there (yes, I'm trained and experienced).

My kind of fire:

Marty

 

[BillBingham2]

While all are good, the shoot of the man in his driveway is the most powerful.

Best of luck, stay safe and healthy.

Thanks for enlightening us to a story I haven't seen or heard anywhere but national public radio.

B2 (;-<

 

[Keith]

Great images. I live in the hills behind Brisbane in a semi rural area on the D'agular Range ... we are tinder dry and the area is heavily vegetated. We are all on edge ... I have never experienced heat and dry combined with occasional powerful winds on this scale in my life and it ain't comforting! 🙁

 

[CharlesDAMorgan]

Thanks for the link. It's hard, in this rather rain soaked country to visualise and experience such infernos. The courage of those fighting this threat is magnificent, but my primary emotion is hoping that no-one here or in the areas affected has to go through such devastation and fear.

 

[lynnb]

Great images. I live in the hills behind Brisbane in a semi rural area on the D'agular Range ... we are tinder dry and the area is heavily vegetated. We are all on edge ... I have never experienced heat and dry combined with occasional powerful winds on this scale in my life and it ain't comforting! 🙁

I was wondering how you were going Keith. Fingers crossed! Do you have arrangements to evacuate the animals at short notice? Maybe not the python 😀

The Bangala Creek fire in far northern NSW claimed my ancestral home today. I still haven't heard from some relatives, but they should be ok. The whole area was tinder dry and there had been no fire since 2000, so the fuel load was high. The fire has burned >100km2 and is still totally out of control. I am very glad I am far away; I'd be one of those guys in a yellow suit out fighting it if I was there (yes, I'm trained and experienced).
Marty

Sorry to hear about that Marty. Hope everyone's OK.

 

[Keith]

I was wondering how you were going Keith. Fingers crossed! Do you have arrangements to evacuate the animals at short notice? Maybe not the python 😀



Sorry to hear about that Marty. Hope everyone's OK.

We sort of have a plan and Jaffa is the only large animal here at the moment. They have a warning siren a few ks from here and our local RFB people are pretty good! It's mainly luck you need in my opinion!

 

[trix4ever]

My property came within 8km of the Torrington bushfire in northern New England in New South Wales, over 75000 hectares with the wind blowing towards us at 60km/h.
We were evacuated and working out what to take was an interesting exercise.
I took all my cameras, albums, hard drives and books, my wife took jewellery and lp's.
we did not even think of taking the telly, never watch it!

We had 6hrs warning and took 3 4wd loads.
Very scary stuff and 10 nearby houses were destroyed, ours thankfully survived and we live to photograph another day.......

 

[Out to Lunch]

Can people insure their property against these fires?

 

[peterm1]

Can people insure their property against these fires?

I am not sure of the present situation but in the past, yes insurance has been possible though there were moves to introduce higher premiums or other restrictions in some high risk areas (e.g. forested areas).
The ironic thing is that it has generally been almost impossible to get insurance for flooding caused by water rising up (not flooding caused by damaged roof etc). The reason being that floodplains, low lying areas etc are bound to flood sometimes and hence insurers do not wish to insure such risks on the grounds that they are not risks but certainties. And other people situated elsewhere do not need it. Though I always thought this to be unfair. This situation contributed to a major civil law case concluded against Qld government for misadministering the management of dams water release protocols contributing to major floods during heavy rains some years ago.

 

[nickthetasmaniac]

Thanks Lynn, I hadn’t seen those shots. A bunch of my colleagues from Tas Parks have been deployed in NSW and it sounds pretty grim.

Bizarrely ‘summer’ in the Tasmania high country has been the opposite. Snow and rain most days, and walkers rescued from near a Cradle Mountain today with hypothermia and waist deep snow..

 

[lynnb]

There is a new picture gallery from the fires in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Some of the pictures are quite confronting in the fire's ferocity. The "mega-fire" to the west of Sydney now covers >350,000 hectares, making it the biggest single mid-latitude fire in recorded history, according to reports. Only large fires in Siberia, Alaska and Canada have been bigger. Currently there are over 100 active fires in New South Wales alone. Thick smoke has been blanketing Sydney, Canberra and regional towns. Several major highways and many secondary roads are closed.

 

[raid]

This is really scary, Lynn. Stay safe.

 

[robert blu]

A very impressive series, I just went through them with my wife. It's terriffic.
Thanks Lynn for the link.

 

[Archiver]

Bushfires in Australia

Australia has the tragic tendency to have spontaneous and devastating bushfires. While these usually occur in rural and country areas, some suburban areas that have a lot of parkland and trees can also be affected. Right now, fires are raging all over Australia, with human and animal lives lost, and properties destroyed. Even in the suburbs, a pall of smoke clouds the skies.

In 2006, bushfires caused the sun to turn red, and cast a grey haze over everything. Not even famed St Kilda Beach was safe.


F30 - St Kilda Pier Smoke by Archiver, on Flickr

In 2009, the summer heat brought destruction to an entire country town in Victoria called Marysville. Residents rallied to rebuild, including the local sculptor, Bruno Torfs. By the time I went back in early 2010, the land had been cleared and growth was returning to blackened forests.


CV35/1.4 - She rides in memory by Archiver, on Flickr


DP1 - Green Not Black by Archiver, on Flickr

Places where buildings once stood were bare, marked only by the signs of businesses lost.


5DII - The Cumberland Slumbers by Archiver, on Flickr

I was going to make a trip to Canberra this month, but this has been cancelled due to smoke pollution being 22 times the hazard warning level. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers.

 

[charjohncarter]

In California we have the same. I have been watching reports on our TV which is spotty and unhelpful, but I get it, it isn't going well. We are all thinking good thoughts for your country.

 

[peterm1]

I live in Adelaide, South Australia and we in this state have also have been afflicted quite badly though not to the extent of those living in the eastern states. Many homes and farm etc properties were lost a week or so back in the Adelaide Hills to our east and large out of control fires are still causing casualties (with two more people reported dead today) and burning out of control on Kangaroo Island, an island off the south coast of SA and third largest island in Australia. Reportedly one third of that island has now burned.

I am safe enough, living within 4 km of the centre of Adelaide and in any event there is no present threat to this city but last night was difficult enough (though small beer compared to what others have suffered). A southerly change carried smoke from the KI fires into the city a distance of about 200 km, and as with other cities (including Sydney a week or so past) air was badly polluted last night. I awoke coughing with the feeling of finding it difficult to breathe and the house was full of fine particulate matter - essentially fine ash - this morning. Minor for us - a mere suggestion of how bad it has been and still is for many. We have such fires from time to time sadly, as does for example California with our legacy of cool wet winters and hot dry summers which dry the soil and vegetation out drastically making perfect conditions for fires to break out and ravage the country side. Sadly many state governments have also dropped the ball and given into urban based pressure not to have regular precautionary burning of forest litter in cooler months to get rid of the build up of fuel load that contributes to the danger when fire comes. As it always does. This vastly increases intensity of such fires making them impossible to control as there is just too much heat - a fact which is driven home when looking at burned out cars with rivulets of melted aluminium from wheels that have melted from the furnace-like heat.

 

[nickthetasmaniac]

In California we have the same. I have been watching reports on our TV which is spotty and unhelpful, but I get it, it isn't going well. We are all thinking good thoughts for your country.

Not to diminish what happened in California, but to give a context of the scale of what is happening in Australia at the moment... The 2018 fires in California burnt approx. 2 million acres. Thus far, the fires this season in Australia have burnt more than 12 million acres. The scary thing is that the 'normal' bushfire season starts now. Ie. there's no expectation that conditions will improve for months, and it's highly probably that new fires will start before the season is done.

This was a shot I took last summer, from Cape Pillar in the south-east of Tasmania. It was terrifying watching this lightning storm cross a tinder dry landscape and knowing what it meant.



This was from the same spot 10 days later. The fires wouldn't stop until well into autumn.



This season we've been lucky in Tasmania. There's a handful of fires going but nothing to the scale of what's happening on the Mainland.

We had a scare a couple of days ago when a fire started at Glenlusk, which is only a couple of kilometres from the suburbs of Hobart, and right next to the extensive bushland of Wellington Park. The Tasmanian Fire Service hit it with 16 units and a bunch of aircraft and managed to extinguish it before it got established. Fingers crossed for the rest of summer...

 

[ChrisN]

It's been very smoky in Canberra for the last two weeks or so. Air quality has apparently been rated as amongst the worst in the world!

[url=https://flic.kr/p/2i9PRJU]

BW536003

by Another Chris, on Flickr[/URL]