WE were all appalled by the death and destruction that was the Victorian bushfires early this year. On Black Saturday nearly 200 people died. The number of koalas incinerated probably runs into the thousands, the number of native birds dead in the millions.
A Royal Commission was established with the Victorian Government promising an inclusive process with the broadest possible terms of reference. Preliminary hearings by that commission begin today in Melbourne, but already many experts with local knowledge and experience have been advised their tesimonies won’t be heard; that they will not be given leave to appear before the commission.
After Black Saturday, there was a memorial service, broadcast nationally and attended by many dignitaries’ including Princess Ann. It was opened by a representative from the local aboriginal tribe. She commented that the land was once burnt every seven years by her people. But not like these fires, she said, they tortured the land, our fires cleaned it.
Foresters have also advocated controlled burning recognising that debris quickly accumulated on the forest floor and that the best way to manage this is through regular burning, or risk uncontrollable and much more destructive wild fires.
But this advice has not been heeded either.
Because of the conversion of large areas of land to national park, a reduction in resourcing along with policies underpinned by the assumption that active land management is not always compatible with wilderness values, fuel loads have generally increased.
In 2004, so concerned about the situation, a group of men whose professional careers had been dedicated to understanding forest ecology and/or bushfire behaviour formed an association called Forest Fire Victoria Inc. In short the members of this new association all had proven records in the area of bushfire management; that is they had held important positions and/or published in the best journals. Furthermore, they were mostly Victorians – with a deep knowledge of the local forest environments.
The stated purpose of the association is to:
• Provide and promote independent and expert opinion on forest fire management;
• Ensure that Victoria’s forest fire management policies and practices are based on science, experience and accountability; and address social, economic and environmental values of natural ecosystems;
• Ensure that the long-term well-being and safety of forest ecosystems and their surrounding rural communities are protected.
Today, the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission begins its preliminary hearings, but so many important persons have been excluded; they have already been notified that the requests they lodged to appear before the commission have been rejected, including Forest Fire Victoria Inc.
That’s correct, I have been informed that Forest Fire Victoria Inc. has been refused leave to appear before the Royal Commission.
The government had assured the people of Victoria that:
• The Commissioners will have extensive powers to call for any papers or persons relevant to their inquiry.
• This commission will have the capacity to examine every aspect of the bushfires – no stone will be left unturned.
• The Commission has been asked to make recommendations on a wide range of aspects including fire preparation, planning schemes, response measures, communication systems and strategies, and training and resourcing.
• The Government has approved $40 million for the establishment and operation of the Royal Commission.
Much has been said about government’s paying lip service to consultation particularly as it relates to land management – not only in Australia, but across the English-speaking world. But to actually exclude testimony from the recognised local experts within a community … we indeed appear to be entering a new error of rule by political bureaucracy.
****************
Links and Notes
Bushfire Royal Commission website
http://www.royalcommission.vic.gov.au/Leave-to-Appear
FIRES ROYAL COMMISSION TO HAVE WIDE TERMS OF REFERENCE
http://www.premier.vic.gov.au/premier/fires-royal-commission-to-have-wide-terms-of-reference.html
Forest Fires Victoria Inc website,
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~frstfire/aboutus.htm
Members of Forest Fires Victoria Inc,
Peter Attiwill, PhD, BScFor, AssocDipFor, is Principal Fellow in Botany, and Honorary Fellow, The Australian Centre,The University of Melbourne. He has researched in eucalypt ecology over 40 years, with a concentration on soils and nutrient cycles, and on bushfires and ecosystem recovery. He is a member of editorial boards of a number of Australian and overseas journals. He has published extensively in the international journals, and his latest book is Ecology: An Australian Perspective (co-editor BA Wilson, Oxford University Press 2003).
Phil Cheney, FIFA, BScFor, DipFor, is Senior Principal Research Scientist, Division of Forestry, CSIRO. He was head of CSIRO’s Bushfire Research from 1975 to 2001. He has forty years of experience in research into bushfires including bushfire behaviour, prescribed burning, mass fires, fire ecology, aerial and ground suppression, fire-fighter physiology, fire-fighter safety, heat transfer, home protection and water catchment hydrology. He was awarded the CSIRO Medal for outstanding research achievement in the application of fire science for safer fire-fighting and safer communities.
Brian Gibson, AM, BScFor, BA, began his career with the Forestry Commission, Victoria. He then moved to the private forestry sector, and was Managing Director of Australian Newsprint Mills Ltd from 1980-1989, and President of the National Association of Forest Industries from 1987-1991. He was a Liberal Senator for Tasmania from 1993 to 2001. Mr Gibson is a director of several companies.
RC (Bob) Graham, AFSM, DipForCres, has more than 40 years experience of fire prevention, suppression, and prescribed burning. He was a principal (Level 3) Controller and Operations Officer at major fires in Victoria including Ash Wednesday fire, 1983, the North-East fire, 1985 and the disastrous north-east fires, 2003. He has led task forces to South Australia and to the Blue Mountains fire, 1994. He is currently a Managing Director and consultant on wild-fire behaviour and suppression in both native forests and plantations, and in planning and conducting prescribed burns.
Athol Hodgson, BScFor, DipFor, has more than 50 years experience in fire management and forest fire research in Australia, USA, Canada, France and Spain. He was formerly Chief Fire Officer and then Commissioner for Forests, Forests Commission of Victoria. He was a Member of the Board of the Country Fire Authority and a Member of the State Disaster Committee. He was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship to study fire management in North America, and is a graduate from the National Advanced Fire Behaviour School, Marana, Arizona.
Rod Incoll AFSM, BASocSci, GradDipBus, DipFor, developed fire management skills as a forester from 1960. Rod set up the Commission’s fire training 1971-1972. He was District Forester, Toolangi 1976-1984. From 1984 he was an SEC divisional manager, a role that included fire protection of electricity production assets. From 1990-1996 he was Chief Fire Officer for public land in Victoria, a director of the CFA Board, the State Emergency Services Council, and the Australasian Fire Authorities Council.
AD (Tony) Manderson MEnvSci, DipFor(Cres) has 43 years experience in natural resource management including native forests, plantations and agricultural land. His fire experience covers all roles from front line fire-fighting to control and logistics at major forest fires over many years. He managed fire control training for the Forests Commission, was Resources Manager for the Victorian Plantations Corporation, and developed the Regulations that formed Industry Brigades within the CFA. He is currently a farmer and consultant on rural environmental issues.
WGD (Bill) Middleton, OAM, DipFor, has some 50 years experience in management of forests, of nurseries and of vegetation habitat in rural areas. He is a broadcaster, public speaker, lecturer and adviser on gardening, natural history, forestry and conservation. He has served on many scientific and community-based boards and committees concerned with wildlife research and landscape conservation, and is an Honorary Life Member of Birds Australia. He is a Board Member and Supervisor of the innovative Potter Farmland Plan for ecologically-sustainable agriculture, and a Board Associate and consultant for the Trust for Nature.
David Packham, OAM, MAppSci, worked for 40 years in bushfire research with CSIRO, Monash University and the Australian Emergency Management Institute. He was responsible for fire-weather services in the Bureau of Meteorology. His extensive research concentrated on the physics of bushfires, and he applied this research to practical issues including the development of aerial prescribed burning, non-evacuation of properties, modelling of fire behaviour, and forensics. He consults extensively on survival of people during bushfires, on fire risk and on coronial inquiries into deaths during fire-fighting.
Kevin Wareing, BScFor, DipForCres, is a forestry consultant and co-author of the narrative of the 2003 Alpine fires in Victoria. He was employed for some 40 years in the Forests Commission, Victoria and its successors in native forest management, plantation expansion, forest education, timber harvesting and industry development policies. He was manager from 1988-1995 of commercial forestry in Victoria’s native forests and plantations. He was awarded a national medal for forest fire fighting service.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Dear Jennifer,
It is remarkable that the Royal Commission has decided it does not want to listen to input from Forest Fire Victoria. Lawyers acting for the Royal Commission have also advised the Institute of Foresters of Australia and the Bushfire Front Inc that it also does not wish to grant them leave to appear before the Commission.
The net effect of this is that the Commission will not hear from any of the three independent professional organisations in Australia with experience and expertise in bushfire management, fire science, research and administration. All three organisations will, of course be making written submissions, but these lack the same impact as a face-to-face presentation, with the opportunity for the Commission to ask questions and delve more deeply into important issues.
It would be interesting to know what were the Commission’s criteria for deciding who they will listen to, and who they won’t. This might become clear when we hear who are the organisations or individuals who get the nod.
Roger Underwood
The Bushfire Front Inc
I thought the idea of a Royal Commission was to bypass the politics. – well there you go.
I suppose Luke will now come and abuse those gentlemen with ad homs.
Call me paranoid, bu this has always been my fear, particularly as the first hearings with those most affected were all held behind closed doors.
The public will never know what took place.
I have just spoken with Simon Paton, from the Streeton Group, who is following this up and I will report if he gets back to me.
There is considerabe danger that this Commission will become another “Green Wash.”
Pikey.
Jennifer,
“That’s correct, I have been informed that Forest Fire Victoria Inc. has been refused leave to appear before the Royal Commission.”
You are aware of the hearing procedures in Communist and other authoritarian countries are you not?? I believe here in the US they are trying to tell us we are only “Socialist” now!!
Of course Forest Fire Victoria and the Bushfire FRont should be excluded. They will only say that more prescribed burning is needed. From political and academic sources we already know that the Victoria fires were caused by global warming and arsonists. The purpose of the Royal Commission is to confirm this. Who do Peter Attiwill, Phil Cheney and Roger Underwood think they are? Bushfire experts or something? We need people like Mr. Esplin, Professor Enright, and Dr Malcolm Gill to give a balanced opinion.
The rule of thumb in calling Royal Commissions is that you call call one only when you know the outcome of its deliberations. CF Sir Humphrey Appleby.
Louis,
Good old Humpy. By the way, how does one get one’s portrait displayed? Send it to Jen? I think it is time to reveal my distinguished features to an anxious and adoring public. But then, of course, if one wants to keep a secret, one must keep it secret that one has a secret to keep… The Royal Commissioners might remember that, assuming that they are sound, and notwithstanding any indications to the contrary.
Anybody is welcome to make a written submission. I think they’re trying to avoid a lawyer fest and bloviating blowhard love-in. Speaking of bloviating blowhards, enter Ian Mott stage left….
Not only have all the fires experts been excluded so to the forest sector. VAFI has also been rejected despite their detailed knowlege of the forests and the ability of the industry to help fight bush fires.
http://www.forestsandtimber.com.au/dtn/details.asp?ID=234
Lets hope that the Wilderness Society and all the other green groups have also been refused leave to appear
Just filing this here:
The counsel assisting the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, Jack Rush QC, says while people knew February 7 would be a day of risk, they were not aware they would be dealing with a fire of “phenomenal” speed.
Issues to be dealt with by the inquiry: stay or go policy, refuges/shelters from bushfires, controlled burning, public alarm systems
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/20/2547313.htm
Everything connects to everything. The recent refugee boat disaster shows that a fire will spread rapidly, indeed explosively, when there is a lot of fuel scattered around. When there is less fuel, a fire can occur, but it will be milder, and with vigilance, can be extinguished before it really gets hold. Let’s hope the Royal Commission understands that much physics. Otherwise they may find themselves under close scrutiny from those who have actually attended, studied, and fought bushfires.
From the ‘Leave to Appear” link:
“Leave to appear may be granted to a person or organisation whose conduct is to be scrutinised or questioned as a consequence of evidence lead before the Royal Commission.
It is unlikely that a person whose conduct is not under potential scrutiny would be granted leave to appear…”
At the same time,the Terms of Reference give the Commission freedom to pursue “Any other matters that you deem appropriate in relation to the 2009 fires.”
As well, the ten wise men are welcome to make written submissions.
These are the opening days of a long process; I think it is premature to say that these experts will not be heard.
VAFI can’t appear! Pass me a hanky, I think I’m going to bawl.
If people were not aware of the danger on BS, they have only themselves to blame. Warnings of the extreme danger started on the Wednesday and received blanket coverage. It goes back to the point I made on the last article on the fires, ignorance and apathy played a large part in the overall toll. I wouldn’t go as far as Mott and call unfortunate victims “dead bimbos” or “late… clowns”. And “greenies” are the misanthropes right?
Green Davey, your comment is typical of the ignorant nonsense posted by interstaters and rednecks. You have no idea.
The Kinglake fire started on a farm, spread to plantations and travelled kilometres, killing people and destroying properties in the process, before it even hit forest. There was no time to suppress the initial ignition from a downed powerline. It was off and running before anyone even knew it was there.
The Marysville fire started in a forest fuel reduced in 2008, travelled through heavily managed forest and then passed through 2008 fuel reductions burns on the outskirts of Marysville. A local reckons the fuel reduced forest ended up looking exactly like the non FRB forest.
The RC will go some way to exposing the rubbish you people peddle but I don’t expect you’ll change your views while there’s a buck to be made.
Green Davey
Jennifer mentioned it before – there is a website labelled gravatar ? in which one can register one’s email and then attach a picture which you upload to it. Then when you email is noticed in a blog, it attaches your uploaded image.
It strikes me that with the enormous amount of blogging and commenting, having some ‘bot’ check on commentator email and associated image might generate a lot of internet traffic. The paranoid in me thinks it’s big brother keeping check on what I post hither and thither.
There is another source of ignition – oil exploration company personnell when working in the Sahara report that sometimes when it’s hot and dry and windy that the static electricity is a problem on the ground – thinks spark and cause all sorts of worriesome effects.
I am quite used to seeing bush fires start spontaneously in the tropical north of Australia at the onset of the monsoon season, and then it’s attributed to “lightning” but this tends to become problematical when there are no thunderstorms in the area.
Nice to see the AGW trolls continuing their bilious post. Would not be Luke under, yet another, name change would it?
Just filing this here:
“It nirly made me chuck today, I was at the commission and witnessed a barister pleading for leave for victims to appear, Teag was not at all helpfull.
“One really has to ask what this is all about. I told the Heraldsun that I thaught the government was likely to run out of whitewash before this was all over.
Only the agencies directly of interest so far have leave.”
No it would not Louis – as you are the troll.
But anyway – yes indeed stupid politically inept decision by the Bushfire Commission not to grant leave to the learned gentlemen !
Luke
Troll:
“One who purposely and deliberately (that purpose usually being self-amusement) starts an argument in a manner which attacks others on a forum without in any way listening to the arguments proposed by his or her peers. He will spark of such an argument via the use of ad hominem attacks (i.e. ‘you’re nothing but a fanboy’ is a popular phrase) with no substance or relevence to back them up as well as straw man arguments, which he uses to simply avoid addressing the essence of the issue. ”
Right……..
Louis,
You are the one trolling here at the moment.
And why not acknowledge Luke’s comment that the “learned gentlemen” should have been granted leave to testify.
I would suggest that this defines Greens very well.
Jennifer, as a European living abroad I read your blog from time to time to see what is going on in Australia – this is really ugly and feels like home. It is so weired, people who dont have a clue of what they are doing as elected politicans can now even push away any type of a remote responsibility. It’s funny to see how low the standards for the media are. Not only in Australia.
But here one can see 200 people being dead! And these people deserve that the hearings are not only done by “greenish clowns”. Maybe also the people who have survived this time should be interested to hear experts, and not just shallow political talk and fingerpointing to global warming etc. No political arena is free of these kind of games, especially true for uncritical media, but overall Australia takes a solid leading position here on how not to deal with a disaster. Thanks for bringing this public.
Davey
I heard a survivor of Marysville on the radio. Just around where she lived, there had been burning off done. For some reason, people assume this has not been done.
There has been burning off being done in the Yarra Valley when grape harvesting by wine makers was being done. The wine makers were furious. Can’t win, can you?
It frightens me that this seemingly politically motivated Royal Commission may not identify the real reason for the devastation of the 7th of February 2009 fires – the huge fuel loads. Instead there is focus on the new industry of ‘climate change’ and whether people’s knowledge and preparedness for a bush fire was good enough while fitted into the current rules and regulations.
We fought the fires on our own here in 06/07 and in our area now, the bush is so dry it would easily burn again. But will the various departments do anything about it? No. There are too many rules and regulations. Yet the people who knew the bush in times past would have just gone ahead and done patchwork burns each year. It would have been quick and simple. They took it as their responsibility to look after their section of the bush. That responsibility and the subsequent knowledge has diminished. Even experts from the group Forest Fire Victoria are being ignored it seems.
It disgusts and frustrates me that the belief systems of a huge city based bureacracy has been allowed to drown out the knowledge of people like Forest Fire Victoria. It is yet another example of dismissing well informed practical information.
In fact, writing and discussing issues from a knowledgable rural perspective actually holds no power. Look at all the decisions against the advice of groups of rural and farming people all over the State of Victoria – the removal of the Mountain Cattlemen from all of the Alpine National Park and a lot of the State Forest land which borders it, the draining of wetlands and river systems to provide water to regional cities, the creation of more National Parks in the South West and up along the Murray, then draining the Murray even further with the creation of the North South Pipeline to Melbourne.
I think actions speak louder than words – and that’s the only way rural issues are going to change – but that takes a lot of courage and a lot of people brave enough to either defy bad laws and regulations or insist that political parties change their positions in order to represent the advice and needs of rural and country people.
”
It frightens me that this seemingly politically motivated Royal Commission may not identify the real reason for the devastation of the 7th of February 2009 fires – the huge fuel loads. Instead there is focus on the new industry of ‘climate change’ and whether people’s knowledge and preparedness for a bush fire was good enough while fitted into the current rules and regulations.”
You didn’t read what I wrote, did you?
There is also the issue of stubble. Even that is enough to kill, as has been discovered in these fires and the deadly fires in South Australia in previous years. If conditions are bad enough, and these conditions were the worst ever experienced in Victoria, then burning off will make no difference.
“But by 10am and even midday on February 7, there was little fire activity in Victoria.
“There was no reported fire in Kilmore East, Horsham, Kinglake, Marysville, Strathewen, Callignee, Bendigo or Coleraine,” he said.
“Why would a resident of any of the fire-affected regions implement the ‘Go’ part of the policy if they were not aware of any fire threat?”
Mr Rush also said that while Victorians knew in advance that February 7 was a day of extreme risk, they did not understand there was a chance of “a fire that could not be fought”.
He said a rating of 12 to 25 on the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index was considered high and a rating over 50 extreme. “The index on 7 February reached previously unrecorded levels ranging from 120 to 180.”
The blazes probably reached an intensity of 100,000 kilowatts per square metre. “The maximum intensity for control of forest fires is about 4000 kilowatts per metre,” Mr Rush said.
He said the commission would hear evidence that communications failed to cope on February 7, with warnings falling behind the advancing fires and the way they developed after a wind change.”
http://www.theage.com.au/national/bushfires-commission-to-examine-mass-evacuations-20090420-acr5.html?page=2
SJT and Festival of Hate,
I gather you both think that reducing fuel makes no difference to fire behaviour. If so, then clearly neither of you has any knowledge of actual bushfire, nor of basic physics.
As a primer, try reading Steve Pyne’s ‘Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia’, and his more recent ‘Fire: A Brief History’. Then join your local Bushfire Brigade and attend a few hundred fires. Then talk about traditional burning, as I have, to more than thirty Aboriginal Elders. Then carry out over a hundred experimental fires, in which fuel quantity and fire behaviour are measured and compared. Then I will take note of what you say on the subject. Until then you are just empty vessels, making a lot of noise.
P.S. If people plant vineyards in known fire prone areas, then they can only blame themselves if the grapes are sometimes smoked. Which is more important, profits from suburban wine sales, or country people’s homes, livelihoods, and lives?
Much hand clapping to Wendy and Green Davey for sensible posts in my opinion.
To SJT and Hate.
I am sure you both are aware of my views from previous posts, so I will keep this short.
I don’t believe anyone here is suggesting that HRBs will prevent all fires, or all loss of life.
We are suggesting that they play and have played for generations an important part in sensible, sustainable management of our forest areas.
What I would like you both to explain to us all here is:
If the present totally centralised, bureaucratic, fire fighting regime, with its huge resources of equipment and manpower is so effective.
1: Why were the Canberra fires so devasting?
2: Why have most of the forests of N.E. Victoria been burn out at least twice in the last 10 years, some of this area 3 times?
3: Why were one of these fires allowed to burn for 63 days, destroying millions of hectares of prime forest?
4: Why were the recent BS fires still burning and threatening life and homes 3 weeks later?
5: Why is it that if I now drive from Kankoban to Cann River through the southern Alps I see destroyed forest most of the way; in stack contrast to many trips through this magnificent area over 60 years?
Just answer us that if you don’t mind.
Pikey.
SJT,
we read and then ignore what you write because it is typically little more than propaganda.
Please do some research and post the schedule of COMPLETED burns showing how over half of the areas in question had controlled burns in the last 2 years!!
Maybe this will be information presented to the Commission??
By the way, your comment about stubble is classic. If stubble is so dangerous, why wouldn’t a control burn consume it?? Please bless us with your logic on this burning question!!!
“I gather you both think that reducing fuel makes no difference to fire behaviour.” Green Davey. This is the typical opinion expressed by someone who doesn’t understand extreme fire behaviour in Victoria. You obviously don’t understand the physics at work when we get a bad fire on a bad day. Ground fuels are a small percentage of overall fuel load and therefore are only a minor factor in fire intensity and speed. We have fires where everything but the boles are consumed by the fire. Some forest types accumulate ground fuels at such a rapid rate that the benefits of FRBs are lost within 3 years. In extreme conditions, fire will achieve maximum rate of spread when the fire front grows to 100 meters.
FRBs are effective in some instances but in such conditions other strategies are effective in preventing deaths and property damage. We are yet to see comprehensive and comparative cost benefit analyses of different strategies.
The argument for broadacre fuel reduction is essentially political. Even proponents like Cheney acknowledge that there is a dearth of empirical evidence to verify the efficacy of the practice. Without extensive landscape scale studies and research it will remain an article of faith.
No-one is arguing against FRBs but they will not save lives and are of dubious, if any, value in extreme weather fire events. If we are to utilise limited resources efficiently we need to know a lot more about FRBs. We need empirical data to accurately assess their worth in extreme conditions and we also need to know a lot more about ecological impacts in a variety of environments.
If saving life is the primary objective of fire management strategies, FRBs are a non starter. Rather than public money being used to fund bushfire armies and bureaucracies, there may be more cost effective technical solutions related to building codes and fire refuges.
Now that productive forests are managed for woodchips, foresters (IFA) might be looking for another string to their bows? Forests will still need ecological burns so we might need to marry that purpose to preventative burning.
Wendy Stoney even wheels out the old Alpine grazing myth. I was up in the Alps over Easter. Some of the highest fuel loads I saw were in areas that had cattle in them. Until cattle start eating sticks I think we can safely file that argument under BS.
The real attraction for cattle grazing in the Alps is the cheap cost to graziers. A dollar a head for the season? I wonder if the attraction to Alpine grazing would be so strong if they were charged commercial agistment rates?
What do I get as a taxpayer for subsidising Alpine grazing?
I saw cattle stomping around, crapping everywhere including in the creeks, creating quagmires and trampling peat bogs and swamps. And as I wrote, the fuel load was as high as I saw in all my travels over 10 days.
It’s about time these squattocratic bludgers got their snout out of the public trough. Also, if it weren’t for the “city people” you seem to despise, where would you sell your beef?
In response to your questions Ron Pike:
1. Extreme weather (and pine plantations in close proximity to residential areas).
2. Dry thunder storms with hundreds of lightning strikes. There are (could not be) enough rappelling crews and responsible agencies are, rightly in my opinion, reluctant to put lives at risk fighting fires in remote and difficult locations.
3. They chose a strategy of containment and backburning rather than risking lives. Two fire crew died, not enough for ya? Sure there are cowboys who want to be heroes but then the public ends up compensating and supporting their dependents. Keeping a lid on wannabe cowboys is pure pragmatism on the part of fire managers.
4. The fire edges covered thousands of kilometers. I.E. lack of resources and reluctance to risk lives.
5. Briefly, I blame the timber industry. They opened up and dried the forest and also modified the physical structure of the forest. The spatial arrangement and moisture content of undisturbed makes them much more fire resistant.
“I gather you both think that reducing fuel makes no difference to fire behaviour.”
You didn’t read what I said, did you?
Right (Left?) Wing Festival of Bushfire Gobbledygook,
You seem to have a smattering of fire knowledge, but are a classic case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.
Of course ground fuel is not the only fuel. Back in the 1960s I attended fires in karri forest which started in the ground litter, jumped into the two metre shrub layer, then into the tree crowns. Before that, back to the 1940s, I saw plenty of grassfires in Africa, much like those today in the Northern Territory. Where were you at that time? I don’t think you can tell me anything about fire behaviour.
You are almost right on one thing. In some vegetation types ground fuel will build up within 2-4 years to carry fire again. That’s why Nyoongar people burnt jarrah forest at 2-4 year intervals. That way all fires were mild, creeping along, and leaving patches unburnt. More intelligent than chanting the mechanistic pseudo-scientific whitefella mantra of ‘twice or more the juvenile period’. That just gives fierce fires and a simplification of the landscape. You have much reading and field observation to do.
Perhaps you are the sort of whitefella to whom a local Elder was referring when he said that ‘whitefella got maggots in his head’. The same Elder said that the area he knew (swampy paperbark country) was traditionally burnt every 2-3 years. This was independently confirmed by an elderly European lady, whose family had been in that area since the 1880s. She said that ‘The bush would have been burnt every few years, every two or three years’. Despite uneducated claims to the contrary, history is an essential part of ecology.
Before you rush off into another tizzy, I will repeat that broadscale, frequent mosaic burning actually quarantines fire refuges, which may go unburnt for long periods, or even never burn. Lack of frequent, broadscale mosaic burning results in big fierce fires, total refuge destruction, and enormous loss of native species. Not to mention humans and their property. Try to get that through your ignorant urban noddle, there’s a good lad.
“Why is it that if I now drive from Kankoban to Cann River through the southern Alps I see destroyed forest most of the way; in stack contrast to many trips through this magnificent area over 60 years? Just answer us that if you don’t mind”
Simple Pikey, CLIMATE change!
In relation to 2003 fires that impacted Canberra suburbs it was likewise with drought, high winds and dry fuel up in the sky in the form of a giant dustorm. Some of that fire raced over brown paddocks like a football at an AFL grand final. Major fuel sources between the Murrumbidgee River and the city then were large crops like thistles, wild oats, blackberries and pines.
Flying across Victoria in Febuary 2009, any one could see that conditions on the ground were as bad as they can be considering previous decades and fire seasons.
“I will repeat that broadscale, frequent mosaic burning actually quarantines fire refuges, which may go unburnt for long periods, or even never burn. Lack of frequent, broadscale mosaic burning results in big fierce fires, total refuge destruction, and enormous loss of native species. Not to mention humans and their property”
Davey; we have moved to a situation where most humans now live in fixed abodes. Modern laws prevent us lighting up the neighbourhood particularly during sustained drought.
I like the bit about the fires producing 100,000 kW of energy per square metre. That would mean that a fire 100m x 100m would produce 1000 gigawatts, which is maybe 50 times the output of all the power stations in Australia put together. Hmmm…
GD, you think patronising me adds something to your argument? Good luck with that tactic!
I lived down south for a few years and I can tell you that despite superficial similarities – you know, gum trees and stuff – these two environments are worlds apart. I can also tell you that your Nyoongar mates wouldn’t have the audacity to try to impose their law/lore on this part of the country. Is cultural imperialism a hangover from your time in Africa?
“fierce fires and a simplification of the landscape” is an interesting concept and connects with a point I was making to Ron Pike about the effect of the timber industry on the ecology of Victorian forests. On my recent trip I was struck by how the timber industry directs its energies toward the mixed species and ash forests at higher elevations.
Having flogged the lower foothill forests into scrubby shadows of their former glory, they are now logging previously untouched and remote forests in the high country. How is it that after 200 years of logging and land clearing, and with the public being told the industry operates sustainably on 60-100 year rotations, they are still knocking over old growth forests that have never seen an axe let alone a chain saw or bulldozer?
These elevated forests are interesting anomalies in terms of fire regimes in this part of the country. The fire interval can be surprisingly long. Parts of Errinundra Plateau haven’t seen fire for 500 or more years. Given that some of the trees up there are at least 600 years old, it’s possible that fire intervals might have been considerably longer perhaps even extremely rare.
Without further research we can only hypothesize and speculate about original fire regimes. We all know the basic theory; Gondwanic forests have given way to Eucalypts over more than sixty million years of evolution. The drying and warming climate, and fires caused by lightning, would have been primary contributors to the adaptation and expansion of the Eucalypts.
With humans arriving some time in the last 100,000 years (maybe longer) fires became more common and accelerated the natural processes.
People seem to assume that Aboriginal fire regimes across Australia were homogeneous but the physical evidence and written history contradict the notion.
The elevated forests of the Alps are illustrative of the point. Aborigines migrated into the Alps in summer for the food and cultural events of the Bogong Moth season. These wet forests had, and still have, understoreys containing remnant Gondwanic species. If these forests were prone to raging wildfires, the Gondwanic species would have disappeared long before even Aborigines arrived. I’d say this environment was safe for humans on foot and would even have provided refuge if a fire caused by lightning did occur while they were up in the Alps. Various factors gave these forests natural defences against fire.
Ron Pike wonders why the great forests of East Gippsland now show extensive signs of fire. I’ve got some theories.
The first relates to land clearing. About 66% of tree cover in Victoria has been lost since European colonisation. This has resulted in reduced rainfall and a general drying of forests. Surviving forests have been drying out and the damp and wet forests have been contracting as more frequent and intense fires push the ecotones of these forests to higher elevations and more isolated pockets. As the wet and damp forests act, much like rainforest, as dampener to wildfire, wildfires have a greater capacity to travel further, faster and hotter.
Second, industrial forestry operations have modified forests in ways that make them more fire prone. With the introduction of clearfelling we’ve seen wholesale modification of natural systems with the express intent of converting forests to monocultural woodlots. Where the old growth forests, especially those in elevated areas, had wet or damp understorey and physical structures that combined to resist fire (the same principles apply to riparian strips and rainforests), the regrowth forests are more prone to drying and have uniform vertical and horizontal structures that facilitate higher intensity fires.
In combination, these two factors have significantly contributed to the recent phenomenon of “megafires”. Rather than being a panacea for such megafires, a knee jerk reaction resulting in the indiscriminate and widespread use of FRBs may only compound the problem (as I pointed out in my comments on the last BS article). We have inadvertently created a series of feedback loops that spawn megafires. With a preponderance of vocal vested interests and rear view mirror visionaries, I’m not overly optimistic that the process will be halted any time soon.
“You seem to have a smattering of fire knowledge, but are a classic case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.”
You are a classic case of ignorance. Stubble is enough to kill these days.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25282319-11949,00.html
“A new report into the 2005 Eyre Peninsula bushfire disaster in South Australia, which killed nine people, has found intensified farming and an associated reduction in livestock grazing provides “greater potential for fire to become large and more severe”.
While the researchers stressed that practices such as continuous cropping, minimum soil tillage and direct drilling to sow crops were not in themselves at fault, higher yields and the shift away from grazing livestock on harvested crop stubble had increased fire fuel loads. As dryland farmers abandoned the plough, a path was effectively cleared for flames to roar across the landscape.
“This review has identified significant knowledge gaps in the management and risks posed by current farming practices,” the report to the South Australian Government warns.
Headed by Kevin Tolhurst of Melbourne University and the Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre, the study was recommended by the coroner who investigated the Eyre Peninsula bushfire deaths.
Four of the nine victims were children, who perished after flames erupted outside the town of Wangary and blasted across the lower peninsula, west of Adelaide. No warning was issued because bushfire controllers wrongly assumed the blaze had been controlled, Deputy State Coroner Anthony Schapel found.
About 80 per cent of the 78,000 hectares engulfed was agricultural land used to grow wheat and other grain crops, oilseed and to raise livestock.
Wheat grower John Lush, a past president of the South Australian Farmers Federation, said growers were “between a rock and a hard place” as they tried to maximise production and manage the fire risk.
“I don’t know whether there is any easy answer,” he said from his property at Mallala, 57km north of Adelaide.
Dr Tolhurst told The Australian that “knocking down” crop stubble and creating relatively small but strategically placed fire breaks might add to farm costs but would reduce the fire risk.
Reduced cultivation over summer and autumn for weed control and bigger paddocks also exacerbates the bushfire threat. “
SJT
You seem to think that lethal stubble fires are a new phenomenon. In fact, there were severe stubble and crop fires in WA in the 1800s. However, there were no severe fires in the adjacent jarrah and wandoo forest, because it was burnt every few years by mild patchy fires, creeping along all summer. Nobody tried to put them out, and did not have the means anyway. The first attempts at forest fire fighting were after World War I, when one man on a horse or bicycle would be sent, with an axe to cut down a red gum sapling as a beater. Such an approach is only possible when flames are less than a metre high. This suppression of fires led, within a few years, to fires that could not be suppressed with green branches or hand-tools. A former Conservator of Forests, Stephen Kessell, states this quite clearly in his annual reports to the WA parliament for the 1920s. Kessell was trained at Oxford University, and was emotionally and ideologically opposed to burning, despite advice from locals that it was essential.
Grass fires can certainly be lethal, even to large animals such as elephants and rhino. Google on kruger+fire+2001. The severity of that fire was due to a stupid policy, proposed by European ‘ecologists’, of trying to exclude fire from bush that had been burnt every few years by Bantu cattlemen for centuries, and by San people for thousands of years before that.
You are right that I do not have first hand knowledge of Victoria, but I did note that an Aboriginal woman mentioned traditional seven year burning at the opening of the Royal Commission. Perhaps that is the right period for some Victorian vegetation types. A flammable mosaic will only remain spatially stable if each patch is burnt as soon as it will carry a mild fire. Leave it longer, and the mosaic will rapidly and inevitably coarsen, with large connected areas of heavy fuel. See Erdos-Renyi (1959) on ‘giant patch formation’. It doesn’t matter if the fuel is stubble, grass, shrubs, or trees.
P.S. Occam’s Razor (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem) says we do not need ‘climate change’ to explain the ferocity of the recent Victorian fires.
P.P.S. I have just looked up Wiki’s excellent discussion on William of Occam. It is probably better to say ‘Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per paucieri’ (It is futile to use more things than are needed). The old ones are always the best, heh?
“SJT
You seem to think that lethal stubble fires are a new phenomenon. ”
I seem to think that burning off is not enough to solve the problem. And has has been pointed out already, have you tried to work out yet how many people, how much time and how much money it would take to do controlled burns of all the areas in Australian that need burning off? Also, Marysville had had recent burning off done around it, according to a resident.
“P.S. Occam’s Razor (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem) says we do not need ‘climate change’ to explain the ferocity of the recent Victorian fires.”
It’s not a matter of need, it’s a matter of evidence. The 47C was unprecedented, as were the levels of moisture. The speed of the fire was unprecedented. That was the problem. The existing command and control structures were entirely unable to cope. The standard risk factor calculation was unprecedented. Where 30 to 50 was a normal warning of possible high fire danger, this day gave a factor of about 150. Unprecedented. You seem to be so like many of the ‘cooler heads’ around, berating people for accepting a religious orthodoxy, when, if you look at the claims, it is you who are stuck with an orthodoxy, one with a level of scientific understanding from half a century ago.
One observer said the was moving a speed that worked out to be something like 200km/hr.
People need to start thinking about what sort of response they will make when the deaths of 200 people are swept under a carpet of green bull$hit and cliche. The people who were most likely to take a gun and shoot the people who deserve to be taken out and shot are all under counselling. They are in counselling, not for their own well being but, rather, to ensure that the culpable avoid the retribution they justly deserve.
It is rather ironic that few things would give the victims families a greater sense of closure and “justice seen to be done” than the sight of a few negligent government heads on a pike. But, instead, they will all have their symptoms treated while the green disease continues to run rampant, degrading every principle, policy and public asset it touches.
I find the blatant, self serving casuistry of festival and SJT deeply offensive.
“I find the blatant, self serving casuistry of festival and SJT deeply offensive.”
This coming from the person who jeered at the people who died in NSW during a burning off operation. What did you call them again, Ian?
Wow, Hate you need to be careful you are in danger of suffocating on your own pontificating bull dust.
I believe it has already been suggested here that a little knowledge is dangerous.
You are a clasic. Your responses to my questions are infantile and deserve little comment.
1. Your response completely overlooks the fact that local firefighters could have extinguished these fires days before they became a menace.
They were ordered not to by the city bureauracy.
See my short summary of this tragic event posted at a previous story on the fires.
That the people responsible for allowing this tragedity to unfold have never been brought to court is a black day for NSW justice.
2. Are you seriously suggesting that lightening strikes have suddenly proliferated in recent years? Why were fire crews with vastly inferior equipment in previous times always able to contain fires in this area? Your response is an insult to readers.
3. Well wasn’t their containment wonderful. The fire was not impeded in any way. It stopped when it reached the sea. Again you are writing nonsence.
4. Hate, I will spell it out for you. The answer to all of my questions is the same. The only real difference between the last 12 or so years and the previous 120 years in relation to fire fighting and forestry management is this.
About 12 years ago in both NSW and Victoria the total control of bush fire fighting was centralised to large bureaucracies established in Sydney and Melbourne. At the same time in response to back-room deals done between Labour and the Greens, all practices and techniques stoughtly learnt at the fire front were dumped and a Green Friendly regime was put in place.
To ensure that this econonsence was rigorously obeyed, the following rules were put in place.
All operational decissions could only be made by head office.
All fires that started in National Parks and Forrestry areas were not to be extinguished, but allowed to burn. This was what nature intended!
Back burning to stop a fire was forbidden. By the way Hate, I have noted before, that from your comments, you have no idea what a “back- burn” is.
A back-burn is only one that is started in front of an advancing bush fire, to burn against the prevailing wind.
That in summary is why we are having so many destructive, hot and out of control fires in recent years.
Claims that it is because of global warming, hotter or dryer conditions are all without fact.
Ironically the temperature on BS was exactly the same as the temperature on the day of the 1939 fire.
Just a couple of other comments.
Hate, the total area of permanetly cleared land in Victoria is 9.8%. Not your calimed 66%. The vast majority of this is in the Mallee. You make this stuff up as you go along.
Gavin, GW is also responsible for Bob Brown’s hair loss.
SJT, you also make up rubbish as you go along. It is physically impossible for a fire to travel at 200klm/hour. If that were the case the whole fire would have burnt out at the sea by dusk on BS.
Fear factor results in the speed of fire travel often being widely exagerated and we can all understand this.
Pikey.
Ian,
I think I’ve got it. SJT and Festival of Eco-Rhubarb are school teachers of a type I well remember.
Has either of them yet read the books I recommended, joined the Bushfire Brigade, attended a few hundred wildfires and burnoffs, done experimental fires, and talked to Aboriginal Elders? I think not. As I said, empty vessels making a lot of noise. They would be funny, if the results of their stupidity were not so serious. I doubt if they have heard of Paul Erdos and his ‘giant patches’, nor will they look him up. Too close to the jugular.
The idea that burning off is an impossibly big task is just a glib fabrication. Land owners, park rangers, and bushfire volleys could do it easily if they were not hamstrung by tin pot regulations and copious form-filling. It would be far cheaper than fighting mega-fires.
On the subject of fuel reduction (controlled) burning, in his annual report for 1924, Conservator of Forests Stephen Kessell said that ‘Departmental employees are provided with horses to enable them to proceed to a fire quickly … In previous years the method employed was direct beating with bushes, and great success attended such efforts. In the season under review, however, the conditions were difficult owing to the increased inflammability of the bush, through protection’ (i.e. fire suppression and exclusion). Note: Anyone who knows horses will be aware that they have a great fear of smoke and flame, so the fires in question must have been very mild indeed for the horses to go anywhere near them.
In 1926 he said ‘Local forests were fortunately not subjected to the same extensive fire damage as resulted from the very serious bushfires in the forests of the eastern states. There is little doubt that extensive controlled burning carried out by the Department and efficient organisation in centres where extensive reforestation work is in progress were to a large extent responsible for comparative immunity from serious damage.’
In 1928 he said ‘ A man may learn to know an area of 7,500 to 10,000 acres thoroughly, and choose the times when various portions may be safely burnt to advantage, especially when he is constantly on the job and in a position to take advantage of a few days or even a few hours suitable weather at any time of the year.’
The history of human fire activities is essential to understanding Australian landscape ecology. Only mechanistic ‘ecologists’ fail to grasp that. Would SJT and Festival of Eco-Rhubarb like some more history? I can oblige, because there is a mountain of it. Perhaps they would like mathematical evidence of why Aborigines knew (still know) to burn most places as soon as that area would carry a trickling fire. I have that evidence too, and will be presenting it at a conference soon.
I hope the Royal Commission will give prime importance to bushfire history, and be wary of half-baked ‘models’ published in ecological journals with half-baked referees. Mathematics, including statistics, is not a strong point with most biologists who have fashionably re-labelled themselves as ‘ecologists’. Inept modeling should be declared a ‘threatening process’.
“SJT, you also make up rubbish as you go along. It is physically impossible for a fire to travel at 200klm/hour. If that were the case the whole fire would have burnt out at the sea by dusk on BS.”
I’m making nothing up, I’m going on what was reported in the paper from an eye witness account.
Pious Ian Mott; He came in late but when he came in he was all class….
I understand your dilemma though. The royalties from woodchipping old growth forests don’t go far. After you’ve built and maintained bush tracks and roads, and after you’ve paid public servants to facilitate those operations, what’s left to conduct research into the ongoing impacts of those operations? Not much eh?
RP –
1. With regards to Canberra, while I don’t claim to know all the ins and outs, you’re the classic case of 20/20 hindsight and a rich imagination.
Are you trying to get yourself sued?
“local firefighters could have extinguished these fires days before they became a menace. They were ordered not to by the city bureauracy. “ Who ordered them not to?
Suggest you read
http://www.courts.act.gov.au/BushfireInquiry/The_Canberra_Firestorm_Report/The%20Canberra%20Firestorm%20(VOL%20I)%20(chapter%205).pdf
By my reading of this chapter of the inquiry, you’re either a fool or liar. Probably both.
2. “Why were fire crews with vastly inferior equipment in previous times always able to contain fires in this area? “ Like in ’39? You may not have noticed the drought down here, or AGW, or acknowledge the human induced changes in forests and climate I outlined in my last comment? All these influences have seen an increase in the number of fires in the Alps since 1998. But it’s all the greenies fault because you are delusional and in denial.
3. “It stopped when it reached the sea. Again you are writing nonsence. “ Which fires reached the sea? I don’t like all the backburning with hot fires but I understand the decision to put lives first. It’s not just your precious productive forests that were burned, nearly all the old growth within a 100km radius of Melbourne also went up including one of the largest stands of OG in the state. These fires are having a devastating impact on forests. If I thought rampant FRBs would solve the problem I’d support the practice. Too much fire feeds the negative feedback loop by encouraging fire responsive and fire adapted species and also by reducing those areas that naturally inhibit bushfire.
4. Your living in a paranoid fantasy world Pike. Get a grip man. Your incoherent rant on this point was barely intelligible but a few spasms caught my attention.
“Back burning to stop a fire was forbidden.“ So how do you explain the fact that a large percentage of the entire area burned was actually burned in backburns?
“the temperature on BS was exactly the same as the temperature on the day of the 1939 fire. “ Wrong in fact but my point was about cumulative effects anyway. Black Friday didn’t occur in the midst of the worst drought in white history (probably human induced – or at least exacerbated by human activities) and it occurred 70 years ago. We’ve had 70 years of industrial forestry to lay the foundations for megafires.
“Hate, the total area of permanetly cleared land in Victoria is 9.8%. Not your calimed 66%. “ Cite a reference. Mine came from…
http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/DSE/nrenlwm.nsf/childdocs/-FA20C94F64F19A5E4A2567D7000B194D-6913EC9CCBBC588A4A2567D7000B1ADD-00B8EF5185137DA3CA25713200051344?open
Green Dopey, I bow before your superior ability to construct fallacious arguments through “appeal to authority”. I particularly like the way you questioned my perceived lack of first hand experience and then referred to the theoretical works of a mathematician who probably wouldn’t know a gum tree if it fell on him. Nice one.
“The idea that burning off is an impossibly big task is just a glib fabrication. “ OK then, use your mathematical abilities to calculate a linear length of Melbourne’s urban fringe (you don’t even have to include outlyers), then calculate the number of suitable days for FRB, and an adequate number of staff and divide the sum of those elements by the public’s willingness to fund a redneck fantasy. Stick the quotient in your reality checker and tell me what you get.
“I hope the Royal Commission will give prime importance to bushfire history” So do I. I hope it recommends that governments fund some serious research into pre-European fire regimes and the impacts of industrial forestry on fire behaviour.
You’re p!ssing in my pocket and telling me you’re fighting bushfires.
To Green Davey, Ian and All,
I think all hopes of an open enquirey have been dashed.
It was anounced late today that:
“The views of firefighters and public servants across all Government departments and agencies must be signed off by the minister in charge before being lodged with the Bushfire Royal Commission. The Premier can then decide to have the final say if the submission will be allowed to go to the Commission.
Sounds like a total cover-up to me.
It is time for all of us determined to maintain our democracy to stand up and demand better.
To SJT, in relation to your last comment. Care to give us a reference for that? As I said before I can understand the sentiment, however I believe you are lying.
Pikey.
Lying?
“Mr Ropar, sobbing at times, said it took just two minutes for the flames to travel 20km, roar up the Sherwin Ranges and explode over the top.
“The fire was jumping like a big-foot giant. Giant steps,” Mr Ropar said. ”
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25031886-5012974,00.html
I’ll accept an apology.
SJT A fire travelling at 600kmph? Travelling south, at that speed, it would have hit Arthurs Ck in about 2 minutes. It would have hit the outskirts of Melbourne, Mill Park in about 10-15 minutes. I think either Mr Ropar was misquoted or he was mistaken. Windspeeds were in excess of 100kmp so he’s saying that the fire was travelling at 5 times the speed of the fastest windspeed. Fire can travel very quickly up a steep incline but there are no 20km steep inclines. Care to comment?
“SJT A fire travelling at 600kmph? Travelling south, at that speed, it would have hit Arthurs Ck in about 2 minutes. It would have hit the outskirts of Melbourne, Mill Park in about 10-15 minutes. I think either Mr Ropar was misquoted or he was mistaken. Windspeeds were in excess of 100kmp so he’s saying that the fire was travelling at 5 times the speed of the fastest windspeed. Fire can travel very quickly up a steep incline but there are no 20km steep inclines. Care to comment?”
I think he was mistaken to an extent, in a moment of panic, about the speed of it. But you get the undeniable impression of something that was extreme and unprecedented. But I was not lying about his account.
SJT ‘I think he was mistaken to an extent’. The alarm bells should have been ringing before you even quoted this ‘fact’.
‘The 47C was unprecedented’ you say in an earlier post. Check your facts – the Argus reports that on Feb 6th, 1851, the temp was 47.2C (117F) just before the 1851 fire which wiped out 5 million hectares (nearly 25% of Victoria).
First to SJT, I apologise for suggesting you were lying.
What you have proved with your response however, is what most of us here have believed for some time. That you will grab any sensationalist or outlandish comment and post it here as fact.
Fortunately the majority of posters to this site are genuinely seeking truth and reason on subjects that are both emotional and complex. That you and Festival of Hate are prepared to post nonsence and blindly argue from unsupportable foundations does little to assist in the pursuit of truth.
Drought conditions at the time of Black Friday in 1939 were very similar to those of January this year. Just check the records and stop the silly statements.
To Hate, Congratulations, you and the Department of Sustainability and Environment Victoria have just made the most amazing discovery.
We mere mortals at this site all thought that the Australian Native people when white man arrived in 1788 were subsistance hunter gathers, with little technological development.
I was amazed to find from your reference at the site of DS&E Vic. that they had access to Landsat images of Victoria in 1750!
Amazing!
Hate, this is the same group of clowns that last year put out a report ” That 91% of the river red gums in the MDB had been cleared by whiteman.
Truth is: Most of the water courses in the MDB have more red gums now than they did in 1788. Most of the valleys have more red gums now than when I was a kid fishing these rivers with my Dad.
The reason for this is very simple and is again related to fire and flood. Details would be beyound your powers of comprehension.
Paul Sinclair who has been a spokeperson for DS&E Vic. has also made the claim on ABC “That 1000 klms. of the Murray Valley all of the river red gums are dead or dying.”
Truth is: Totally false claim.
Finally to the ever Lurking Luke.
You know that drought you constantly tell us is a direct result of AGW?
Well you heard it here first.
It is close to over and I predict will be by the end of June.
All the top half of Australia has just finished the second year of record and near record summer rains. This area now includes northern NSW.
Lake Eyre is on course to fill to the highest level since white man arrived..
All of the East Coast of Australia is in the second year of way above average rainfall. Many centres having already received above the annual average so far this year.
Millions of megalitres of water are flowing needlessly to the sea every day.
Western Australia is now mostly out of drought conditions.
This only leaves the wheat belt of SA, Vic and southern NSW.
Guess what, right on queue for an Autumn break it will be raining accross this area for the next few days.
Luke, has AGW disappeared or is this a very normal chain of events.
Pikey.
No SJT, you have been proven, once again, to have extrapolated from very specific data to absurd lengths. Yes a fire may travel at great speed up a slope for a short time but the prospect of 600km covered in a single hour would put the fire front right out into Bass Straight.
In the same way Hate has used specific examples of limited fuel reduction burns to wrongly imply that they were widespread and ineffective.
Hate is always willing to link to some departmental misinformation about clearing but what he cannot avoid is the fact that almost 98% of Victorian Box Ironbark forest, for example, is young dense regrowth that is too immature to support Ringtail Possum populations. The Bull$hit he links to is the sort of analysis that classes the removal of the 3 trees/hectare from a pre-settlement open woodland as equivalent to clear felling a closed canopy. The predominant feature of most of pre-settlement Victoria was grassland and that grassland remains, despite the removal of a few trees.
Yes, Ron and Davey, Brumby made the sort of noises he was expected to make in the immediate aftermath of the fires but the conspiracy to pervert the course of justice is now in full swing.
“What you have proved with your response however, is what most of us here have believed for some time. That you will grab any sensationalist or outlandish comment and post it here as fact.”
The opening address for the Royal Commission referred to ‘undprecedented speed’. The inability of the existing control and management infrastructure to respond adequately indicates unprecedented speed. The anecdotal evidence indicates unprecedented speed. It’s not just one piece of evidence with nothing to back it up. It’s consistent with a theory supported by different sources.
“Yes, Ron and Davey, Brumby made the sort of noises he was expected to make in the immediate aftermath of the fires but the conspiracy to pervert the course of justice is now in full swing.”
Brumby made several statements in the days leading up to BS that the threat we were facing was extraordinary.
SJT As with the ‘unprecedented heat’ statement I refuted above, so it is with the ‘unprecedented speed’. In the 1851 bushfires, burning embers were carried some 30kms out to sea and the smoke reached northern Tasmania thick enough to blacken the sky. Imagine the speed of that fire, enough to send embers that far. “Unprecedented’ means never ever happening before – so what an unusual thing for the Commission to say. It has happened before!
I’ve never been to Oz, and I’m not in a position to evaluate the claims and counterclaims made by participants in this thread, who were on the ground at the time, and who may have lost friends and family members during the recent Bushfires. I do have a little fire-fighting experience in N. California. Would you believe stopping a wildfire with a 2m-wide fireline? Obviously this is very different from the tinderbox that you call home. However I can comment about the nature of commissions, at least in the U.S.
First an observation by the late systems scientist, Glenn Burress (whose specialty was economic policy):
When the level of accountability of any organization drops below a certain minimal level, the actual behavior of that organization will be the exact opposite of its stated purpose!
That was the major premise. Here’s the minor premise:
The typical investigatory commission–at least in the U.S.–has an immeasurably small level of accountability.
That was certainly true of the Warren Commission that looked into the JFK assassination. Their conclusion was that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Then in the late 1970s, Congress did its own investigation. Their conclusion was that there was probably more than one person directly involved, but they did not name names.
My own opinion about the nature of investigatory commissions is that when the system is broken, the powers-that-be will set up a commission to arrive at the foregone conclusion that the system is NOT broken. Everything will be fine if we rearrange the deck furniture and refrain from thinking about icebergs.
Great quote, Larry. It is not helped when the political cost of non-performance is so low.
“That was certainly true of the Warren Commission that looked into the JFK assassination. Their conclusion was that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Then in the late 1970s, Congress did its own investigation. Their conclusion was that there was probably more than one person directly involved, but they did not name names.”
JFK conspiracy theories now. You’ll find it all here, folks.
In your haste to attack SJT you have ridiculed a witness to the fire. I can understand how a witness could calculate a fire speed of 200km/h. If you have winds gusting in excess of 100km/h, combined with pyrolysis, I think a fire speed of 200km/h is not inconceivable over short distances in some circumstances.
E.G. Radiant heat in a lull between winds gusts could cause pyrolysis. When a crowning fire is then hit by a gust of wind it will travel at wind speed and the pyrolysis gases could ignite with the “flashover” further accelerating the speed of the fire.
If the distance between a gully and hilltop is 500 meters, a fire traveling up that slope in 10 seconds would constitute a speed of 200km/h. Horizontal vortices of flame extending from a crowning fire being pushed by a 100km/h wind could do that even without the ignition of the gases.
From some of the video I have seen and having experienced the conditions on the day, I think the first hand description is entirely possible.
SJT wrote:
“JFK conspiracy theories now. You’ll find it all here, folks.”
I agree that JFK conspiracy theories are rather silly. Anyone with more than half a brain knows that Global Warming was what killed President Kennedy!
Festival of Eco-Fantasy,
Paul Erdos didn’t need to see a gumtree. Pure maths is abstract. His ‘giant patch’ idea is, however, directly relevant to the formation of giant fuel patches in Victoria, and anywhere else with flammable vegetation. Because you don’t understand it, or are too lazy to look it up, does not mean it is wrong.
Due to your lack of bushfire experience, the rest of your comments on bushfire are drivel. Have you read those books, talked to those Aboriginal Elders, fought or observed those fires yet? Obviously not, and never will.
With regard to the perimeter of Melbourne, even a smattering of fractal geometry would tell you that it is scale dependent. It is infinite, if you use a small enough scale. That has nothing whatsoever with broadscale mosaic burning in Victoria, or anywhere else. You are confused.
I note, amidst all the blather, that neither you, nor SJT, deny that you are school teachers. I had some very good teachers, that I remember with affection. They taught me how to think. I also had some very bad ones, who tried to teach me what to think. I can see that ‘The Greens’ and their political dogma would be very attractive to the latter type.
RW Festival of Hate
“Mr Ropar, sobbing at times, said it took just two minutes for the flames to travel 20km, roar up the Sherwin Ranges and explode over the top.
“The fire was jumping like a big-foot giant. Giant steps,” Mr Ropar said. ”
Hate, you need to look again at your figures. Mr Ropar’s claim of 20km in 2 mins is 600km/h, not as you quote 200km/h. In your example, in the 10 secs at the speed reported by Mr Ropar, the fire would have travelled nearly 1.7km. He is either being misquoted or there’s been a typo.
“Hate, you need to look again at your figures. Mr Ropar’s claim of 20km in 2 mins is 600km/h, not as you quote 200km/h. ”
I’m just trying to think up something of my own that seems more reasonable. We know it was fast, how fast? I already said, someone standing there watching it happen in real time is going to be in shock, and probably not so aware of the passage of time. The fires were so intense they created their own micro-climate from his description. Add the prevailing wind with gusts over 100km/h to the wind caused by the fire, 200km/h seems a reasonable guesstimate.
SJT & Hate, You are both fabricating nonsence.
Just go and look at the events of the day on BS. See where the fire started and where it was at say 8PM and you can calculate the fire speed.
Obviously wind speed does affect the speed of travel of a fire, however rarely does a fire proceed faster than 20 klms /hour.
Guys it is time to drop the speculative crap and start looking for truth.
You are both an insult to rational thought.
I did though agree with your JFK comment.
Pikey.
“I note, amidst all the blather, that neither you, nor SJT, deny that you are school teachers.”
Therefore, we must be schoolteachers. Amazing.
GD, I think I may have heard of Erdos, a mathematician who devised a formula for a matrix, or mosaic, of burns designed to prevent “critical mass” in fire development? My first thought when I heard about it was how would the formula account for environmental variables like topography, temperature, humidity, wind speed, fuel type, fuel loading etc? These forests are complex systems that defy one-size-fits-all modelling. Every site is unique and, as I outlined earlier, inappropriate application of fire can increase flammability and remove or degrade inherent elements with the capacity to mitigate fire.
If you’ve got a relevant web link where I can read detail, I’ll look at it. Otherwise, it’s a tantalising concept but useless in practice. I have a similarly useful theorem. My First Law (of bushfire) states, “If there are no trees, there are no bushfires”. It’s real handy hey?
As for your aspersions and assumptions about me, just deal with the issues. You don’t know what I do, what I have done or who I know. Unlike you, I don’t need to blow my own trumpet. You strike me as a big noting try hard. Try posturing a little less and deal with specific issues and points and you won’t look so desperate and panicked.
“With regard to the perimeter of Melbourne, even a smattering of fractal geometry would tell you that it is scale dependent. It is infinite, if you use a small enough scale.“
What kind of pseudo-scientific waffle is that? When in doubt, baffle them with bulls… eh? Explain yourself you pretentious git.
Melbourne is a sprawling city with a convoluted interface with the most flammable forests on the planet. As such it presents a clearly definable objective in terms of managing fuel in the area. The practical difficulties of managing ongoing fuel reduction programs make the task a logistical nightmare. We know what is required if you seek to instigate a comprehensive FR program, we don’t need to refer to some obscure mathematical formula with dubious applicability. Once again, I’m left speechless by the absolute ignorance that self appointed “experts”, such as yourself, exhibit.
“That has nothing whatsoever with broadscale mosaic burning in Victoria, or anywhere else. You are confused.“
Fire regimes around the urban fringe will be one of the central areas of inquiry in this RC. The recommendations made will probably effect how, where and why fuel reduction burns are conducted across the state. Given the gibberish you try to pass off as informed debate, I’d suggest you take a look in the mirror before you accuse anyone else of being confused.
Kasphar, read comments closely and make sure you direct your criticisms to the author. SJT originally quoted someone who thought the fire moved at 200 km/h. I don’t doubt that he heard the comment. I too have heard and read, and mentally filed, many salient points since the fires. It is impossible to record or remember every source but to suggest that he/she, or I, would fabricate these things reflects more on the character of the person making the allegation.
SJT was ridiculed and challenged for the comment but that shows that people don’t understand the physical reality of bushfires in Victoria.
Obviously people’s recollections could be distorted by traumatic situations but it is abundantly clear that this fire was extreme by every measure.
RP, I don’t know why I bother. People either don’t read what I write or are incapable of comprehending what I’ve written.
Fair dinkum, this place is worse than a MSN chat room full of 13 yr olds. I might have to give you all detention.
Hate I did read all his comments carefully. Here are the salient ones below.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:31 pm
SJT says, “One observer said the was moving a speed that worked out to be something like 200km/hr.’
April 22nd, 2009 at 5:27 pm
SJT says, ‘I’m making nothing up, I’m going on what was reported in the paper from an eye witness account.’
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:44 pm
SJT gives the newspaper report link. If he had read it he would have realised something was wrong. Then he asks for an apology.
My point was that he quoted something in evidence of the fire’s speed which should have had alarm bells ringing (and then SJT miscalculated the speed quoted). When comments are made like this one to support a case, they add to the misinformation and need to be challenged.
“My point was that he quoted something in evidence of the fire’s speed which should have had alarm bells ringing (and then SJT miscalculated the speed quoted). When comments are made like this one to support a case, they add to the misinformation and need to be challenged.”
I didn’t miscalculate, I said about the quote that they poor guy was probably in shock as he watched and didn’t have an accurate track of time. Hence my re-estimation of what he saw.
SJT says, “One observer said the fire was moving at a speed that worked out to be something like 200km/hr.’ No explanation in this post that you recalculated. You only admitted it after being challenged by Ron and myself. You also imply that this ‘evidence’ supports the claim (admittedly from another source) that this fire’s speed was unprecedented.
SJT says, ‘It’s not a matter of need, it’s a matter of evidence. The 47C was unprecedented, as were the levels of moisture. The speed of the fire was unprecedented.’
The 1851 fire could also claim to have a fire speed equal, if not faster, than 2009. The temperature that day in 1851 was 47.2C (117F), higher than 2009. The point stands – if the information you espouse is challengeable, you lose credibility.
“You only admitted it after being challenged by Ron and myself. You also imply that this ‘evidence’ supports the claim (admittedly from another source) that this fire’s speed was unprecedented.”
I didn’t ‘admit’ anything after being challenged. I didn’t see how a speed of 600km/h was possible, but I knew that man was standing there and watching events unfold that were remarkable. The truth lies somewhere in between, IMHO.
kasphar “The temperature that day in 1851 was 47.2C (117F), higher than 2009. The point stands – if the information you espouse is challengeable, you lose credibility.”
If you want to question credibility, that “record” is not considered reliable.
Hate If that ‘record’ is not reliable, then it has 50% chance of being even higher. And who’s to say that it is not reliable? The Met Office started in Melbourne in 1855 probably using the same type of thermometers used just 4 years before. Are all those records unreliable as well?
Were the reports about embers being deposited 30kms out to sea and the heavy smoke appearing in northern Tasmania that it ‘turned day into night’ also unreliable. Nearly 25% of Victoria was burnt out, and even though only 12 people died, that was a higher proportion of the population than 173+ in 2009.
According to Festival a speed of 200km/hour is essentially the same as 600km/hour, near enough is good enough once they cross the line to willful misrepresentation. Both SJT and Festival have been exposed for latching onto any unsubstantiated report that confirms their prejudices. The fact that they have had to be dragged kicking to accept a 200km/hour does not alter the fact that at no time on 07/02/09 did any fire in Victoria travel a total of 200km in a single hour.
Look at the f@#$& maps to scale you morons, 200km/hour is 3.3km/minute or 55 metres/ second. In the world of reality, far removed from the substance impaired brains of Festival and SJT, not even the helicopters fly that fast. And in that circumstance they would be unable to either catch a fire front to dump water on it or escape from it if they were heading in the same direction.
Indeed, it is unlikely that any fire front travelled a total of 200km over the entire day. So readers should look back over the above sophistry by these two delusional clowns and recognise a couple of venal green apologists when they present themselves.
Festival started out quoting a report indicating speeds of 600km/hour and ended up conceding that 500 metres in 10 seconds was merely “possible”. Yep, what a backdown. From 600,000 metres per hour back to an upper limit of 500 metres in ten seconds. But of course, that sort of correction is entirely within acceptable error margins for your average crazed nutter.
“Festival started out quoting a report indicating speeds of 600km/hour and ended up conceding that 500 metres in 10 seconds was merely “possible”. Yep, what a backdown. From 600,000 metres per hour back to an upper limit of 500 metres in ten seconds. But of course, that sort of correction is entirely within acceptable error margins for your average crazed nutter.”
You can’t even read, besides saying that people who risk their lives to do burning off deserved to die.
I quoted the article, and I didn’t think 600km/h was possible, but what the eye witness described was something remarkable, hence my guesstimate of 200km/h, based on his eyewitness account. Many people were trapped and died, who had good fire plans, and experience, because what they experience was unprecedented.
SJT There you go again, using that word ‘unprecedented’. As I posted before, you use those types of ‘facts’ to back your claims and recalculate them when you were challenged. The 2009 fires were phenomenal, tragic, exceptional, but the climatic conditions and the fire itself were not without precedent.
For the record, SJT, I had earlier stated that some NSW parkies who killed themselves in a fire they lit themselves, without any input from an experienced fire fighter, and who’s actions displayed a complete dearth of common sense, let alone the most rudimentary fire management skills, had “died a bimbo’s death”.
I made this very blunt but factual statement in a context of your own, Festival’s and other green statements that claimed that all cold burns were extremely dangerous. The facts behind your primary and most quoted example, the Kuringai Chase fatalities, make it very clear that it is only green ignorance and incompetence that is extremely dangerous. The stark truth of the matter is that cold burns rarely pose any danger, let alone extreme danger, when green boofheads are not involved.
Now back to the issue of your own and Festival’s willingness to exploit blatantly false and grossly exagerated anecdotes masquerading as evidence. The words are on the page, clowns, you cannot escape what you have already written. You have once again demonstrated a willingness to base your analysis on pure guess without any form of reality check.
Ian Mott “Festival’s and other green statements that claimed that all cold burns were extremely dangerous. ” Where did I write that? You can’t debate the issues so you fabricate?
Kasphar “SJT There you go again, using that word ‘unprecedented’. ”
Don’t take his word for it then, try the BOM;
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/statements/scs17d.pdf
To all the impractical ‘romantic’ commentators who distort things to comply with their religious-like dogma on the various issues such as climate change, the bush fires and locking up the land as a way of ‘preserving’ it – why don’t you actually try to live a better life and consume less instead of using up the resources of the land then justifying it all with false statements?
Or provide your own water and get a real furphy to cart it; create your own electricity as I do then vent your spleens; warm yourself twice by chopping your own firewood, heat your own water and cook your own meals instead of pretending that a renewable rescource like wood, can only be left on the forest floor then burnt in bushfires! Next, have a look at where you live – what streets were macadamised with river red gum blocks, how much wood has been used to build housing, how much toilet paper or other paper is used? Ask yourselves where your water comes from and do something about draining the Murray further with the North South Pipeline.
Then be thankful for what you have and try and keep your opinions to things that you do know about – because you obviously don’t know about managing the bush or bush fire as I personally do, nor do you know about cattle as I do, but you probably believe one of the real furphies where it is claimed cattle belching and farting gas is a problem to the planet – when cattle were actually designed to do this in order to promote the growth of the various plants they consume. Factories and vehicles were not part of the makeup of this planet to add gasses to the atmosphere though. And finally, cattle grazing does reduce blazing – and as a management tool on public land, it is stupid not to use it because unlike another of the furphies being bandied around, the fires went out on the Dargo High Plains areas that were being grazed – but facts get in the way of the distorted so called science a lot nowadays.
Hate I was talking about the 2009 fires and how they compared with 1851. Your link is to do with the heatwave in 2009, not the bushfire. The BOM’s own descriptor is ‘exceptional’ – not ‘unprecedented’. So, since you opened the door, I’ve chosen a few quotes from their report.
‘Melbourne and Adelaide both narrowly missed all-time records during this initial heatwave period. Melbourne’s 45.1°C on 30
January was the second-highest on record behind 45.6°C on 13 January 1939, while Adelaide’s 45.7°C on the 28th ranks third behind two 1939 readings of 46.1°C and 45.9°C.’
(By the way, Melbourne’s 5 consecutive days of +40.0C, plus a 39.9 just preceding it, in 1908 still beats 2009’s 3 days of over 40C.)
Melbourne had no measurable rain from 4 January to 7 February, the equal second-longest dry spell on record for the city (35 days). This approaches the record of 40 days set in 1954-55. Melbourne (0.8 mm) had its second-driest January on record.
Melbourne (six consecutive nights above 20°C) equalled its record set during the 1908 heatwave.
Exceptional, yes. Unprecedented, no, not really. Jan 2009’s max av temp was 28.6C compared to Jan 08 with 31.0C.
Feb 2009’s av max temp was 28.1C compared to Jan 1956 of 28.6C. Longest heat wave in Aust history – Marble Bar 1923/4.
Note all these during a cooler time period than today. And, dare I say it, ‘low’ levels of CO2.
‘Exceptional, yes. Unprecedented, no, not really. Jan 2009’s max av temp was 28.6C compared to Jan 08 with 31.0C.’
Sorry, that’s Jan 1908 with 31.0C. To eliminate confusion.
Kasphar
look at this graph, and stop your cherry picking.
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi
Do you notice anything between one end of it and the other?
I’m happy to go with the BOM’s description of the day as “exceptional”.
SJT Your point being? What did I notice? On average that period was cooler but there are 2 years warmer than 2008. There were some exceptional warm periods and droughts during that time with two heatwaves (1896 and 1939) which killed over 400 people in each and Australia’s longest heatwave at Marble Bar (1923/4). This happened in a cooler period which I posted above.
My point has always been that the conditions surrounding the 2009 fires were not dissimilar to 1851, 1939 and 1983 (hottest Feb on record for Melbourne) and the results of the 2009 fire were similar to 1851.
One interesting thing to note – there was less rainfall Australia-wide from 1900-1950 then the second half of the century. Maybe we are seeing the same pattern happening again (eg Federation drought = our recent drought).
GLEN FISKE, CAPTAIN, MARYSVILLE BRIGADE: I was busy looking out for what I was doing, yes. Yes, we were, we were trying to get our, the strike team set up, up on Kings Road during most of that time.
LIZ JACKSON: And what was the hope for the strike team, what were you?
GLEN FISKE, CAPTAIN, MARYSVILLE BRIGADE: Ah the hope, the little hope. To take the sting out of that spot fire that had started on that southern edge of the town.
LIZ JACKSON: The DSE’s Incident Control Centre had sent two strike teams to Marysville to help fight off the fire, they didn’t arrive till 6.15.
They were sent straight up here to the Kings Road at 6.24, where the spot fire had been seen.
There were 12 fire trucks and tankers manned by over 50 CFA volunteers, with an extra eight or nine firefighters from the DSE.
The DSE guys lit a control burn, to create a fire break.
Within 15 minutes, they were all engulfed in burning embers, and just escaped with their lives.
CFA volunteer Dick Sinclair was there.
DICK SINCLAIR, 4TH LIEUTENANT, YARCK BRIGADE: The control burn was underway and going, going really well. But what got us into strife was the wind change, so the wind swung around more, more westerly and then just brought everything across the top of us.
So when we retreated from one truck to the, to the next to go under, under a fog nozzle which is sort of you’re looking after yourself at that stage and your crew, you know from ground level to the tops of the trees was just embers, it was burning embers, it was very hot.
LIZ JACKSON: Glen Fisk was monitoring their progress, on the radio from down in the emergency complex, which was by then engulfed in smoke.
GLEN FISKE, CAPTAIN, MARYSVILLE BRIGADE: It was getting noisy where we were and dark. And that’s the sort of.
LIZ JACKSON: And you were worried about what was going on up there?
GLEN FISKE, CAPTAIN, MARYSVILLE BRIGADE: Oh definitely because I felt that we were in trouble. So they were out in the, they were out in the open, and they said they were retreating to the oval. And I monitored fairly closely then to make sure that that all of our guys, all of our crews, got down from there and go to the oval. And when I heard them say that they had accounted for everybody I was quite ah, quite relieved. Yes.
LIZ JACKSON: Was your son Kellan one of the?
GLEN FISKE, CAPTAIN, MARYSVILLE BRIGADE: Kellan was yes.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2009/s2553879.htm
“There are some parts of the state where fire reduction, fuel reduction burning has occurred in the last two or three years but it didn’t stop the fire.
“There are parts of Gippsland where that happened, where it just swept through irrespective of the fact there had been fuel reduction.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/21/2548044.htm
Professor Karoly said the devastated area northeast of Melbourne had experienced a 12-year drought before the fires, which had already reduced the fuel load. “But fuel reduction burning would have made no difference. The fires would have been uncontrollable with minimal amounts of fuel.”
He said the fire was so intense that bare soil burnt in some places, and there were reports of the humus in ploughed ground burning.
“We had record high temperatures, a record heatwave two weeks earlier and record low rainfall. We also had record low humidity,” he said.
The previous three years had been so dry the region had effectively missed one year’s rain. The area was also experiencing an unprecedented sequence of days without rain.
“The preceding heatwave from the 28th to the 30th of January, when Melbourne had three days above 43C, was also unprecedented,” Professor Karoly said. “That heatwave would have kiln-dried everything.”
On the McArthur fire danger index, Black Friday 1939 was rated 100. Ash Wednesday in 1983 was rated 120, but in southern Victoria on February 7 this year there were unprecedented ratings of between 120 and 190.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25368290-5006785,00.html
rainfall
–drought index
• Byram-Keetch
Drought index
• Soil Dryness index
–air temperature
–relative humidity
wind speed
drought, recent rainfall, temperature, relative humidity and wind speed
The MacArthur fire danger index was invented in the 1960s. At that time, the rating of 100 was given to the most extreme fire conditions and MacArthur used the conditions of the 1939 fires to reflect this rating (these ratings can now exceed 100).
It measures drought, recent rainfall, air temp, humidity and wind speed. Of these, only the drought index for 2009 would have been worse than 1939 (although 1938 and 2008 had similar annual rainfall in Melbourne). Recent rainfall was less in the six months prior to the 1939 fires. Air temps were similar (a heatwave in the summer of 39/39 killed over 400 people). Relative humidity was low in both and wind speeds may well have been the same.
So what Professor Karoly is saying is that the conditions preceding the 2009 fires were from 20% to almost 100% worse than 1939. The 1939 fires burnt out more than 4 times the area of the 2009 fires. Maybe I’m missing something here, but maybe they should revisit the 1939 fires and recalculate the rating given because poor old MacArthur didn’t think fires could be that much worse.
Kasphar, trying to extrapolate the area burned to the severity of the fire and the prevailing environmental conditions is a nonsense. There are so many variables that the proposition is ludicrous. E.G. what were subsequent weather conditions, where did the fires burn, what tracks existed that enabled backburning etc? First rule when you find you’ve dug yourself into a hole is ”stop digging”!
Here are the facts:
In the ten years from ’97-’07 inflows into Melbourne’s main water storages were about 40% below the long term average.
http://www.melbournewater.com.au/images/annual_lrg.gif
“With just 3 months left in 2008, it is now virtually certain that Melbourne will record its 12th consecutive calendar year with below average rainfall. The previous record is six years set in 1979 to 1984, highlighting the unprecedented severity of the current drought.”
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/rain_maps.cgi?map=contours&variable=drought&area=vic&period=3month®ion=vic&time=latest
Lowest total 1 January to 28 February rainfall on record.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/annual/vic/summary.shtml#recordsRainTtlLow
Highest 1 January to 28 February mean daily maximum temperature on record.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/annual/vic/summary.shtml#recordsTmaxAvgHigh
Melbourne’s 45.1°C on 30 January was the second-highest on record behind 45.6°C on 13 January 1939,
Many all-time site records were also set in Victoria on 7 February, including Melbourne (154 years of record), where the temperature reached 46.4°C, far exceeding it’s previous all-time record of 45.6°C set on Black Friday (13 January) 1939. It was also a full 3.2°C above the previous February record, set in 1983.
Both Adelaide and Melbourne set records for the most consecutive days above 43°C.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/statements/scs17d.pdf
No matter how you try to spin it, records were broken and conditions were unprecedented. You can try to cherry pick the data to point out some similar elements in disparate historical contexts but when you look at 2009 in its totality, with the record drought as a backdrop and rainfall and temperature records falling like tenpins, this period is exceptional because it is without precedent.
I’ll bet London to a brick you’re a AGW denier. Deniers get quite weird in the pursuit of their agenda. Your obfuscation around these points is a classic example.
Hate Just following up on your most recent post.
‘In the ten years from ‘97-’07 inflows into Melbourne’s main water storages were about 40% below the long term average.’
True as I posted above.
“Lowest total 1 January to 28 February rainfall on record.’
True. However, since the fire started on 7th Feb the 2 monthly total rainfall prior to the fire including up to the fire date (ie Dec/Jan/Early Feb) was 77.6mm. The 1939 2 month prior period + up to 13th Jan was 60mm. (totals for Melbourne).
“Highest 1 January to 28 February mean daily maximum temperature on record.”
Wrong – the BOM link you give says some sites had their highest means – some sites also had their lowest means on record.
For instance, Melbourne had a higher av mean temp in Jan/Feb 1908 than Jan/Feb 2009 by more than half a degree.
‘Melbourne’s 45.1°C on 30 January was the second-highest on record behind 45.6°C on 13 January 1939.’
True, but one could argue that the 47.2 on 6th Feb, 1851 beat that.
‘Both Adelaide and Melbourne set records for the most consecutive days above 43°C.’
True. But Melbourne in 1908 had 5 days over 40C peaking at 44.2C- I think 5 days would be more severe than 3 days.
Adelaide had 6 days of +40C in 2009 (Jan av 32.0) – in 1908 it had 10 days of +40C for a Jan average of 34.2C.
http://www.bom.gov.au/lam/climate/levelthree/c20thc/temp2.htm. See this site to help address the balance.
Of course records were broken – some weren’t. The BOM itself calls this 2009 event ‘exceptional’ rather than ‘unprecedented’.
The point I am now making is – why did they have those extreme temps when it was supposed to be a ‘cooler’ climate and CO2 levels were so low? Maybe because of the weather patterns. A blocking system in the Tasman, a strong monsoonal system over the mainland and fronts being forced southward from the strong, warm northerly airflow are the triggers for these heatwaves which may result in severe bushfires.
If you use the ‘unprecedented’ word then you invite clarification and riposte.
But your last comment – come on. All I have done is to ask you to justify your comments. Since you want to accuse me of things, I’m one of those who would rather these stimulus packages were spent on development and research into sustainable green energy technology. The tech we have now is ‘primitive’ and will never supply the base load power we have now. It’s similar to how far we have come with computers – once one computer took up half a room (there’s one in the Melbourne Museum), now we can carry them. But we need to do this not because of global warming, but because it makes sense, both environmentally and economically.
These conditions we have today, high temps, droughts, floods etc have happened before. If CO2 was the driver, we would have seen records being broken all the time. Where I live, average temps for the past ten years are below the long-term average.
By the way, I probably class myself as a AGW agnostic because I see just as many unsubstantiated/misleading comments from AGW deniers as pro-AGWers.
But you still haven’t addressed the point that Prof Karoly is saying that the fire conditions rating prior to the 2009 were on average nearly 50% worse that 1939. I would like to see how these ratings were arrived at. Do you know?
I don’t know how Karoly arrived at his conclusions but a search turned up this interview…
“Linking climate change to individual extreme events is difficult. We have had bush fires in Victoria and south-east Australia in the past, but it is very difficult to say that climate change has specifically caused an individual event, even though some of the conditions associated with the horrendous bush fires on 7 February were unprecedented.
It’s easier if you have conditions that are outside the range of recorded temperatures. We have 150 years of high-quality weather observations for Victoria and the events that occurred on 7 February—for temperatures, relative humidity and low rainfall—haven’t occurred in the past 150 years of observations. So something unusual was happening.
It’s still within the realm of possibility that the extreme conditions could have happened by chance but to assess that we have to look at what sorts of variation we’ve had in the last 150 years and what we saw on the specific day.
What we saw on 7 February were higher maximum temperatures than have ever been recorded before in Victoria—3 degrees [centigrade] hotter than the previous record highest temperature in February. It’s an unbelievable increase to break the record by that amount.
We had the lowest ever humidity, which is the amount of moisture in the air, very typical of desert conditions. We also had the lowest rainfall at the start of a year ever and have had an unprecedented 12-year long dry period in Melbourne and much of south-east Australia. It is difficult to say that low rainfall is necessarily due to climate change but it is remarkably consistent with the climate model projections.
With temperature, we can look at the amount of warming expected from greenhouse gas increases, which is about 6 to 8 tenths of a degree over the last 50 years. The previous record for the hottest day in Melbourne was set on Black Friday for the bushfires in 1939 and it was 8 tenths of a degree cooler than the record set on 7 February 2009, which is exactly the amount attributable to warming expected from greenhouse gasses.
So although it’s hard to attribute to an individual event, everything we are seeing is exactly consistent with the changes expected from increased greenhouse gases.
Rainfall conditions, low humidity and extreme high temperatures are combined together in what is called the Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI). A FFDI of 50 is used to declare a Total Fire Ban day in Victoria. The Black Friday bushfires in 1939 were used to set a base line of 100, which is a fire danger twice as extreme than the standard total fire ban day. On Ash Wednesday [in 1983], we had values around 120.
For the fire on 7 February, we had unprecedented high values throughout many sites in Victoria—never recorded before—of between 150 and 190. Some people say they were higher than that.
The catastrophic fire category was introduced for bushfire conditions greater than 100. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Bureau of Meteorology did some analysis on how the FFDI had increased during the 2000s compared with an earlier period, and it showed that there were large observed increases. They also did analysis of climate model changes associated with increased greenhouse gases and, in fact, predicted a marked increase in these catastrophic fire danger episodes in simulations—exactly what we experienced on 7 February. These sorts of events may occur twice as frequently over the next 25 years.”
I’m also ambivalent about the AGW arguments but I have noted that AGW deniers go to extreme lengths to cherry pick and distort data. The way you ignore the weight of the whole, in relation to 7 Feb, and make comparisons using disparate and unconnected events reminded me of their tactics.
What you are all missing is that wise men have been excluded from the bushfire royal commission. Isn’t that the point of this exchange?
We know that geological studies show that climate has always changed – sometimes it is hotter and sometimes it is colder. Now that is hotter and drier in our neck of the woods we need to prepare for the event of a bushfire.
The thing that not one of you is addressing is that the fires have been as bad or as hot, and recently, not just in 1939 and other dates. In 2003 then in 06/07 great sections of land were burnt to the soil with not a stick or tree standing. And if you really look at it, the recent fires have followed the fuel loads. Just that this time, people instead of just animals and plants were killed because it was in a built up area.
What did the Four Corners program show us with all the people sitting on the oval at Marysville? That if you don’t have fuel around, you will survive. Further, that Native Vegetation laws have meant that roads have become death traps and ‘wicks’ for any fire, let alone one on a day of such a high fire index, so how were people going to get out if they understood how bad the fire was tht was coming anyway? But it is worse! People were looking at the smoke clouds and did not understand that the fire was almost on top of them – they believed that it was smoke from Kilmore! That tells me that people have no experience to inform them.
Average reporters and decision making bureaucrats have no experience to inform them either so they are all distracting from the real problem by focussing on an ‘early warning system’ and whether people should be forced to evacuate. Yes, any fire on a day of such extreme fire weather would have burned but if the fuel loads were not there, it would not have been with such devastation.
Hate Thanks for the post but as you say, I don’t know how he came to these conclusions. Let’s look at some of Prof Karoly’s statements.
He says, ‘What we saw on 7 February were higher maximum temperatures than have ever been recorded before in Victoria—3 degrees [centigrade] hotter than the previous record highest temperature in February.’
Then he says later,
‘The previous record for the hottest day in Melbourne was set on Black Friday for the bushfires in 1939 and it was 8 tenths of a degree cooler than the record set on 7 February 2009.’ Isn’t there a contradiction there?
He says; ‘We also had the lowest rainfall at the start of a year ever.’
Wrong. 1963 was lower with 0.3mm.
His claims about ‘unprecedented’ warming do not stand up to the historical record.
The period between 13 and 20 January 1908 remains the most sustained hot spell in Melbourne’s history. For five consecutive days (16th-20th) the temperature exceeded 40°C (with 39.9°C on the 15th), peaking at 44.2°C on the 17th.
Has anyone thought of doing a rating for the 1851 Vic bushfires?
By the way, I have used data from the BOM website; there has been no distortion. If you say things are ‘unprecedented’ when there are examples which are worse or similar, I will take issue. I have made comparisons with the 1851 and 1939 fires and find many similarities with the conditions in 2009.
Good point, WAJS. The MacArthur fire index does not take into account fuel conditions. Although I don’t necessarily agree that hazard reduction is the only answer (although it seems to be working in WA), it may relieve the situation in some fires. Eliminating vegetation around outlying homes, roof sprinklers, etc and a sensible approach to fuel reduction would all help. A good communications system would save lives but it appears that some states do not want to fork out the money.
If you can be bothered, we’ve argued many of these points previously –
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/03/victorian-bushfires-the-result-of-human-folly/?cp=all#comments
WAJS
Just came across this topic and have read the above posts. Maybe what these two have been trying to do has been in some way relevant to the topic. If the findings include the types of conclusions Professor Karoly has been suggesting, ie that these recent fires have been caused by the increase of CO2 and are the worst ever, then you forget about any other causes you mention. Solution – ETS. Done and dusted. Now, what’s for brekkie?
Hate Yes, we have argued these points before. Hasn’t it been fun? But what does, ‘If you can be bothered’ mean???
And now Thredbo has had the coldest April minimum in Australia on record. Where’s that CO2 when you really need it?
How would the good Prof spin that?
Sorry, not Thredbo – Charlotte Pass.
Kasphar “And now Thredbo (Charlotte Pass) has had the coldest April minimum in Australia on record. Where’s that CO2 when you really need it?”
“GLIKSON: As has been projected by climate science over the last 20 years, the increase in atmospheric energy level associated with global warming results in greater variability, including: greater frequency and stronger amplitude of the ENSO (El-Nino – La-Nina) cycle and extreme weather events (hurricane intensity, floods, extreme droughts and fires) and, most particularly, rapid melt rates of large parts of the Arctic Sea ice, Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and shelves — as is in fact happening around the world, including the recent Australian droughts, mega-bush fires and floods Australia.”
http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20090429-Climate-myths-Glickson-v-Bolt.html
Often the denier camp confuse cold/wet weather events with climate and ridicule the observation that the world is warming. Glikson hits the point with “increase in atmospheric energy level”.
The point being that, regardless of the cause of climate change, the higher temperatures generate greater air pressure differentials (energy). This is what creates the extreme events or weather systems. Forget the hot/cold dichotomy. Look at recent examples of many individual weather events creating new records or pushing toward new records.
In the context of the fires, the deniers would have us believe that the warming stopped ten years ago but the fires were a combination of climate and a extreme weather event. Sure, there is natural variability, but when do we/you/I accept that trends support modelled predictions?
Still can’t buy that argument. Some of our most extreme weather conditions happened before we started on our current ‘warm’ period around 1979. Hottest temps, longest and more devastating heat waves, worst cyclones, low rainfall (just do a check).
I just did a check on Melbourne’s hottest temps for each month and found that only 2 months come up in the present warm period, 1982 and 2009. The period from 1938 – 1940 have Jan, March and April as the hottest one day records (and as we know, 1939 would be the 2nd hottest for Feb).
Are the higher temps caused by CO2 or are they a natural occurrence after the LIA? We’ve had the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warming periods approximately 1000 years apart – and now another warming period.
Maybe CO2 is only a passive insulator that may have a small warming effect on temperature, particularly nighttime temps. By the way, I agree that pumping loads of pollution into the atmosphere is not the smartest thing to do (environmentally speaking) and I support an all-out push for green, sustainable energy technology.
Anyway, Jim Hansen says we have are only 4 more years to save the planet so if we are all still around in 2012, we’ll might well know the answer.
I suppose there is a challenge for a statistician or someone with too much time on their hands. It would be interesting to look at all weather records available and see how many have been broken in recent years.
My instinct is to suggest that I’ve witnessed a cluster of new records in the last twenty years or so but that might be one of those tricks of the mind. My recollection is that falling records have been a frequent occurrence in recent years. It shouldn’t be too hard for a statistician to provide an analysis?
I’m find it hard to believe that the weather/climate records and near records of the past decade are not statistically significant.
On the AGW question, I don’t think that pumping a few trillion tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, and significantly raising the concentration of that gas to unprecedented levels (in human scale) in a short period of time, is a trifling matter.
As with the Olympics, at any time records can be broken.
The present ‘warming’ trend since 1979 should have seen heaps of records broken in all categories described by Glikson in your post as temps have been some 0.5 above the 1961-90 norm. What others fail to mention is that cooling climate can cause their own extremes. Here’s a few that should have been broken.
Highest temp in Aust – Oodnadatta 50.7 C (123.3 F) on the 2nd January, 1960 (if you disregard Cloncurry’s 53.1C in the 1889).
Worst cyclone – Mahina, 4 March 1899. Mahina was a Category 5 cyclone (889hPa) – 400 killed.
Heatwave longest – Marble Bar 1923/24 162 days of 100C+ temps.
Drought – Federation or present day (depends on where you live) but both 100 years apart.
Note – from 1900-1908 (incl) there was less rain than 2000-20008(incl) Australia-wide.
Worst heatwaves – 1895 and 1939 with 400+.
Bush fires – Possibly Victoria 2009 but 1851 would have to be at least as bad but we can’t compare the data. 1939?
Floods – Gundagai 1852 89 lives lost
Some of the worst floods in NSW and Qld happened in the mid 50’s and 70’s (Maitland 1955 and Brisbane 1974). Some others may know what other floods were extreme.
The problem we have in Australia is that we only have records going back some 150 years and some of the earlier records are not reliable. The BOM starts the rainfall record from 1900 and temp records from 1910 so the hot summers of 1906 and 1908 are not part of the record. I believe that we warmed from 1910-1940, cooled from then to around the late 70’s and then warmed again to now. 2005 appears to be our warmest year ever so if the 30/40 year cycle continues, we should start to plateau and cool from 2008.
When you start quoting death tolls we’re way off track. Fatalities cannot be compared. Comparing a toll from one event to another is comparing apples with oranges. It’s subjective.
What we need is thorough analysis of the cold, hard empirical data. E.G. heat, cold, rain, drought, etc. It might even be seemingly insignificant measurements like humidity or cloud cover at certain times of day or in a season that reveal changes. The anomalies could be the outlyers of the trend.
It’s possible that climate change means that Marble Bar is unlikely to experience a record heat wave now.
The 3 day heatwave in January which preceded the 2009 fires by 8 days had temps of 43C, 44C and 45C. Winds were from 50-60kmph at 9:00am with winds dropping to +40kmph by 3:00m.
Humidity was measured in the 50s at 9:00am for each day, dropping to 10, 10 and 9 by 3:00pm.
Feb 5th, 6th and 7th had temps of 29C, 33C and 46C. Winds on the 7th were 83kmph at 9:00am dropping to 39kmph at 3:00pm. Humidity was 23 and dropped to 6 with levels 58-75 on the preceding days.
The hot, windy conditions and low humidity of the Jan heatwave period, (and given there had only been 0.8mm of rain that month), did not trigger the bushfire yet the conditions on 7th did. What was the difference? A 1.3C rise in temp on one day, a slightly lower humidity reading on one of the three days (45.6C triggered the 1939 fires).
It will be interesting to read the findings of this inquiry. Improving communication systems and better building practices could be the main thrust of the findings but blaming AGW would be drawing a long bow.
Do you have a reference or link for those figures Kasphar? I seem to remember the initial 3 day >43°C heatwave as having very little wind (another mind trick?).
On the issue of AGW, I’m more interested in confirming whether or not there is any climate change, anthropogenic or not. If the past 12 years are not part of natural variation within a reasonably stable climatic system but are indicative of new climatic patterns, we’re deep in it.
RWFOH
Yes Daily observations for Melbourne at
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/200901/html/IDCJDW3050.200901.shtml
As far as the past 12 years are concerned, temps have been higher but so has rainfall. The recent 12 year drought seems centred mainly in the SE of Australia. I ran some rainfall figures for the period 1897-1908 and compared them with 1997-2008. Whereas Melbourne has had lower rainfall between 1997-2008 than 100 years ago, Deniliquin had slightly less rain in the earlier period. I remember viewing a photo taken in the early 1900s (I think in the NSW State Library), of horses and buggies using the dry Murray river bed to travel along.
Despite the extreme summer temps in SE Aust during the 2008-2009 summer, the national av max temp was 0.03 below average due to the cooler weather in the north (however av min temps were the 13th highest on record).
Records will always be beaten and we really only have about 150 years or so of data. Is the present warming caused by natural GW or AGW? According to NASA, the earth warmed from 1910-40, cooled until 1975 and then rose again, consistent with trends after ice ages, albeit a mini-ice age during the 1600s and 1700s.
So I really don’t see any climatic patterns that are not consistent with a natural warming trend (and how much does UH contribute to the higher temps?). It seems a paradox that while droughts seem to be more prevalent recently, there has been more rainfall nationally in the second half of the 1900s than the earlier half, and definitely more from 2000-2008 than 1900-1908. I also want to know what’s happening but sometimes outrageous claims from both sides of the debate cloud the issue.
On the question about the difference between the heatwave and BS, it appears that sustained higher wind speeds followed by a southerly wind change was the big difference.
There were going fires during the heatwave but the wind speeds were lower on average.
I don’t think the 9am and 3pm wind readings give a clear picture of overall wind patterns during the day. BS started with a stiff northerly and it built throughout the day reaching a crescendo just before the front. During the heatwave the winds were more flukey and wafting (from my recollection – and partially confirmed by BOM obs)
On a windy day you’ll notice gusts come in ‘waves’ so you could easily get a false impression by reading wind speed at one arbitrary point in time.
With the cold fronts, the winds build in advance and then there is often get a lull before the southerly blasts in. A couple of notable examples of the power of these cold fronts are the disasterous Sydney-Hobart race, Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday.
My reading of events is that Marysville (and possibly Kinglake) was hit by the southerly change. The first stage of a front is usually pretty dry winds before humidity comes up. You’ll also have a few hours lag before fuel starts to absorb atmospheric moisture. The fires run on the northerly and then the flank becomes a massive head being driven by gale force winds. It’s a shocking combination. It’s what hit around the Cockatoo, Upper Beaconsfield area on Ash Wednesday.
It comes back to the point I’ve been making all along, when the climatic and weather conditions come together, the number of people to fight the fire, the equipment available and the area previously fuel reduced are inconsequential. It always seems to be people who don’t live here who have the hardest time grasping the facts. These forests and a confluence of climate, geography and weather create the “perfect storm”.
RWFOH
The winds on 7th Feb were 40-55kmph prior to the S change at around 4:00pm which pushed wind speeds to 80+. Temps dropped from 46C down to 18C minimum overnight and only rose to 22C the next day. The southerly triggered the high winds by squeezing the isobars against the stable high in the Tasman and setting up the conditions for the bushfire.
In Jan, wind speeds were lower and the S change must have been weaker and dropped temps to a minimum of 22C rising to 30C the next day.
So, as you say, it was the strength of the change, plus the other weather factors (temp, humidity, low rainfall), that laid the foundations for the fire (+ suspected arsonists) and I’m sure similar conditions have happened before. However, they do not include those S changes into their MacArthur fire index – maybe they should.
Interesting post!
As a current professional fire fighter I would like to reinforce the importance of quantity of fuel as a predictor of fire behaviour (in addtion to moisture content/winds) and management tool…
Kasphar, you mentioned that McArthurs FFDI does not take into account fuel loadings. Well i have one here that has been recently rectified with an update to reflect this. In Western Australia we have long operated on our “redbook” which also provides an FDI in a manner similar to McArthurs prediction tool however it has always recognised the importance of fuel quantity (per hectare) as a major determinant in fire behaviour.. and this has now obviously been recognised in the updated FFDI meter.
Fire fighters here in WA are always cogniscent when attacking fires in the field of what fuel the fire is burning in and what the fire is likely to encounter in its path when developing strategies and objectives. When fighting a wildfire, I can tell you that we always are very relieved when a fire heads towards an area of prescribed burn containg lighter fuels. Due to the level of FRB in WA this is generally how many of the wildfires are finally contained as the fire behaviour drops to a level that is able to be directly attacked (or at least parallel) so that the headfire is pinched off. Without this strategic mosaic we would face much larger and destructive fires..
So in my mind the strategic benefit of FRBs in managing wildfires is a no brainer… However the resources and commitment to maintaing a reasonable proportion of area of lighter fuels in a manner that strategically disconnects forest blocks of heavy fuels must be maintained.
Our recent larger fires have nothing to do with climate but more with the reduced reduction in fuel management programmes associated with urban complaints about smoke and political interference.
Glad to say that the recent events in Victoria have spurred the WA state government to recently reaffirm a committment to prescribed burning and maintenance of a strategic, broadscale and rotational fuel reduction programme.
One point that seems to be missed in many of these fire related blogs is: If fuel quantity is not related to fire
WA Forester
Good to see that fuel levels are being taken into account in the fire rating equation. WA has, I believe, a better approach to hazard reduction and communications warning system than any other state.
Many believe hazard reduction does not make any difference (and maybe in extreme fires it may not be the be-all and end-all) but any firie will tell you it helps. If fuel levels are not taken into account then why do backburns work so well in controlling fires?