Australian wildfires and heatwave

[Mr. Bill]

An acquaintance who owns a ranch in a rural area near Sydney posted the following:

Tuesday 12/17/19 afternoon:

Expecting temps of mid 40s over the next few days. That's 110-120F for my American friends. Current water restrictions make it against the law to hose down your children or pets. The fire crews in some areas have to truck in water from elsewhere and they're fighting 70m (230 ft) flames.

This is going to be interesting.

Tuesday 12/17/19 evening:

It's difficult to describe what's happening here, but I'll do the best I can. In the last  24 hours, a wave of anger emerged. People are getting stressed. One of the back-burns went bad and properties were lost. The fire services are kind of in a defensive mode at the moment, but this is bad because information is not flowing freely. We need accurate and timely information right now. The prime minister went to Hawaii on holidays and this has a lot of people upset. He's not leading. Truth be told he''s not a leader, but there's a time when you have to step up to the plate and pretend you care what's going on and he's nowhere to be found. This is likely to have a long-term effect on Aussie politics. Speaking for the average man, we're all stressed. This mother of all fires affects not just me, but an awful lot of people.  More than that, it is just a hint of what is happening on a global scale. An entire continent is losing the vast majority of its woodlands in a matter of a few weeks. Don't  worry about what's happening to me. I'll deal with it. It's very likely this is going to happen to you. Please, learn from this. We're dealing with fires at unimaginable scales that cannot be stopped by humans. If us humans don''t get really smart really quick, a lot of people are going to die.

Wednesday 12/18/19 morning:

Yeah it's pretty thick this morning. We usually get the smoke overnight. It usually clears from here also, but as the fire gets closer we're starting to see more and it stays for a longer time. Western Sydney seems to be getting the brunt of the smoke - and I expect we'll start to see respiratory casualties because this has been an ongoing problem for them for over a month. The prevailing winds are *usually* from the west and there's no fire to the west of us currently, whereas Sydney has both of these monster fires (soon to be one) directly to the west.

Friday 12/20/19 morning:

Yesterday was pretty gnarly.  I had pretty bad heat stroke from working outside in 41C (the highest it got here) to clear the area of more burnable things and soak anything that wouldn't move. If this ever happens to you, staying hydrated doesn't help. You have to get out of the heat for any relief. It starts affecting your brain after a few hours. I've been breathing the equivalent of a carton of cigarettes which doesn't help either.

I've got a few friends living in the direct path of the fire at the moment. Those I've talked to are safe, but their houses are going to burn. The only thing saving us is that the prevailing wind is blowing a different direction, but it can change. That's what caused the mayhem in Balmoral and Bargo yesterday. A couple of firies were killed and several injured.

Now we've got active fire cells only about 6 kms away and one needs to watch the horizon every few minutes just in case the situation changes. I'm hoping for a chance to recharge today and tomorrow because Saturday is supposed to be another zinger with temps around 47.

Oh right. You can't really watch the horizon if it's blocked by smoke.

Right now I'm worried a bit about a friend in Pheasant's Nest. It looks like her house is under ember attack right now. She would be evacuated for sure (we hope), but the last I remember her saying was "I can't fit a half dozen sheep into my Toyota".

[Prepper456]

keep us posted on your friend. saying prayers they stay safe

[Mr. Bill]

Friday 12/20/19 evening:

Evacuation in progress.

[Prepper456]

oh no. sheep too?

[Mr. Bill]

Cattle, I believe.  I have no idea how he's handling them, and obviously he's too busy to post right now.

[Prepper456]

prayers for him and his household

[Mr. Bill]

Sunday 12/22/19 morning:

Back home. The active fire front escaped containment to the east and ran unimpeded for several hours. We're just to the south. It was a horrible, horrible day but turned out better than expected.

The fire is still growing and there's still a patch of green across the street for it to consume with no significant rain forecast until possibly March or April. So the fine print: we'll have to evacuate again. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe repeatedly over the next several months. But not today.

Just to document this for the future, the majority of homes and lives lost over the last week were the direct result of two back-burns that got away. The first one was a freely admitted mistake. The second has not been acknowledged, even though it was obvious to anybody watching the events unfold.

As mentioned in an earlier post, humans need to learn quickly about dealing with mega-fires. Mistakes will be made, no doubt about it. We need to have a hard look at every mistake and learn from them. We can't afford to assign blame because this will cause critical information to be lost or corrupted.

A BBC article gives some scale: the land area burned in New South Wales in the past 6 months is 1½ times the area burned in the 2018 California wildfires and 3 times the area burned in the 2019 Amazon fires.

[Gamer]

Just a thought, but maybe terrorists are setting fires in America and now Australia?




http://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/wildfires

[Mr. Bill]

Just a thought, but maybe terrorists are setting fires in America and now Australia?

It's not impossible.  But it's SO easy for a fire to start accidentally.  You can't really appreciate this until you've lived in a wildfire-prone area.  Last summer here (southeast Washington state), a huge fire was started just because a towing safety chain was dragging on the road and throwing sparks.  A fire in 2002 that came within a hundred feet of our house was started by a squirrel that got electrocuted on a power pole.  There are all sorts of trivial things that start fires, and with the insane heatwave that Australia has been suffering, fires were practically inevitable.

[Mr. Bill]

AFP, 12/30/19: Thousands trapped on Australia beach encircled by fire

Thousands of holidaymakers and locals were trapped on a beach in fire-ravaged southeast Australia Tuesday, as blazes ringed a popular tourist area leaving no escape by land.

As many as four thousand people are trapped on the foreshore of the encircled seaside town of Mallacoota...

Authorities had for days been warning up to 30,000 tourists enjoying Australia's summer holidays to leave the area, which is just one of the hundreds ravaged by this devastating bushfire season. ...

On Monday, around 100,000 people were urged to flee five Melbourne suburbs as the spiralling bushfire crisis killed a volunteer firefighter battling a separate blaze in the countryside. ...

[Mr. Bill]

Updates from my rancher acquaintance near Sydney:

12/31/19 evening:

American news isn't providing an accurate picture of what's happening here. Imagine living next to Yosemite and having nothing left tof the California Sierras but a few groves of trees here and there, and having 7-8 fires the size of Los Angeles in a continuous string from Washington state into central Mexico. And they can't put any of them out.

1/1/20 morning:

Meet the new year. Same as the old year. On the bright side the truck is already loaded, since we didn't unpack it from yesterday. We're kind of living in perpetual panic mode now.  Daughter is stuck on the beach on the south coast. All the roads are closed and they cut off communications last night so we can only monitor that fire's advance and hope. Our fire is throwing embers everywhere as it moves closer. That's what burns down houses. Burnt leaves all over the yard and driveway.

[FreeLancer]

Talk about SHTF!

News tonight was talking about how the firefighters they do have are near the end of their rope. A heavy reliance on volunteers has put the country in a bad spot because firefighters are having to leave the lines and go back to their day jobs to pay bills.

[FreeLancer]

Australia wildfires prompt Navy beach rescues, marking largest peacetime evacuations in history

[iam4liberty]

Just a thought, but maybe terrorists are setting fires in America and now Australia?

Brings whole new meaning to term eco-terrorists.

https://summit.news/2020/01/06/nearly-200-people-arrested-across-australia-for-deliberately-starting-bushfires/
Nearly 200 People Arrested Across Australia For Deliberately Starting Bushfires

Authorities in Australia have arrested close to 200 people for deliberately starting the bushfires that have devastated the country, yet the media and celebrities continue to blame “climate change” for the disaster.

The fires have caused at least 18 deaths, destroyed thousands of homes, millions of hectares of land and killed hundreds of millions of animals.

A total of 183 people have been arrested by police in Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania for lighting bushfires over the last few months, figures obtained by news agency AAP show.

In New South Wales, 24 people were arrested for arson, risking prison sentences of up to 25 years.

In Queensland, police concluded that 103 of the fires had been deliberately lit, with 98 people, 67 of them juveniles, having been identified as the culprits.

“The link between arsonists and the deadly fires that devastate Australia every summer is well known and well documented, with the rate of deliberately lit fires escalating rapidly during the school holiday period,” reports Breitbart’s Simon Kent.

Around 85 per cent of bushfires are caused by humans either deliberately or accidentally starting them, according to Dr Paul Read, co-director of the National Centre for Research in Bushfire and Arson.

“About 85 per cent are related to human activity, 13 per cent confirmed arson and 37 per cent suspected arson,” he said. “The remainder are usually due to reckless fire lighting or even just children playing with fire.”

[surfivor]

This is the weird thing about some of these fires and other strange things on fires in general associated with global warming etc. Callers on
Alex Jones yesterday said many of the fires have been set on purpose and fox news also confirms that

https://www.foxnews.com/world/australia-brush-fire-24-charged-new-south-wales

since Nov. 8, authorities have taken legal action against 183 people for fire-related offenses, including 24 individuals who have been charged for allegedly deliberately lighting bushfires – a crime punishable by up to 21 years in prison.

..

According to James Ogloff, the director of the Forensic Behavioural Science at Swinburne University, approximately 50 percent of Australia's bushfires are started by arsonists.

[FreeLancer]

A significant number of Southern California wild fires are also caused by arsonists who come out to play in the Santa Ana winds, and that has been a constant fact out here for forever.  The biggest difference for our fire risk are fuels and weather conditions that are more conducive to fire, and I doubt Australia is that much different. 

Where California does differ is that we have higher population density and can lose a lot of homes in a smaller fire, but that also means we have better access roads to the fires, more aircraft, and can focus more resources and respond quicker. 

Australia has to rely on different tactics because their resources get spread so thin and the magnitude of the fires they're currently dealing with dwarfs the worst of what we've seen here in California.  It's apocalyptic there already and yet still early in the season for them. 

[FreeLancer]

'Never seen anything like it’: The Australia bush fires are generating vast areas of violent weather

Passengers aboard a Qantas Airlines flight to Canberra learned about the extraordinary forces involved in these clouds over the weekend, when their aircraft accidentally flew through one at high altitude. According to an ABC News account of the flight, the sky outside the aircraft’s windows turned bright orange, then pitch black as jarring updrafts shook the plane.

“It just got grayer and grayer,” passenger Matt McIntyre told ABC. “There was one guy sort of swearing. … I heard people down the front vomiting.”

Another passenger told the TV network that it was “the scariest flight” he had ever taken. “It was orange outside of the window, then suddenly it was black, and then the turbulence hit,” he said.

In addition to the air rising rapidly, downdrafts of 60 mph can cause severe turbulence and pose risks for some aircraft. Avoiding such fire-generated clouds in areas that have a large expanse of smoke, such as southeastern Australia lately, can be challenging, he said, because the radar systems aircraft carry to spot thunderstorms don’t detect such clouds very well.

“Nose cone radar did not provide a signal comparable to what you would see from a thunderstorm updraft of that severity,” Lareau said of the aircraft that measured the updraft intensities. “It’s not clear that that threat to aviation from these things is widely known.”

On the ground, though, these clouds are just as violent. Abundant lightning has been observed from these clouds in Australia, Lareau said.

[iam4liberty]

Buzzfeed and Tim Pool do good job explaing how to avoid extremist fake news on Australlian fires.

https://youtu.be/PzWHkBElyWs
Leftists Are Spreading FAKE NEWS About Australia Sparking Climate Change Hysteria

[David in MN]

Granted it's 3rd hand but Michael Malice is discussing this issue on Joe Rogan's podcast. To imagine how much of a disaster this is there are people setting fires intentionally and the government of Australia is a bit heavy handed with regulating how many animals can be exported so there exists a serious risk of losing the only breeding grounds for several endangered species.

I don't know what kind of person intentionally starts wildfires but that's about as bad as you get. People are being burned out of their homes and animals are suffering needlessly because some jerk thought it would be fun to start a fire. Really?

[surfivor]

Granted it's 3rd hand but Michael Malice is discussing this issue on Joe Rogan's podcast. To imagine how much of a disaster this is there are people setting fires intentionally and the government of Australia is a bit heavy handed with regulating how many animals can be exported so there exists a serious risk of losing the only breeding grounds for several endangered species.

I don't know what kind of person intentionally starts wildfires but that's about as bad as you get. People are being burned out of their homes and animals are suffering needlessly because some jerk thought it would be fun to start a fire. Really?

 I would like to see some names or who are these arsonists ? It's very strange and it could even be something organized

[Mr. Bill]

This couple thought they were well-prepared by having a non-flammable house.  It didn't work.

AP, 1/8/20: Family's fortress no match for rapacious Australian fires

...[Justin] Kam and his wife, Helena Wong, had built their home in the New South Wales town of Balmoral with steel framing, reinforced glass so thick you would need a sledgehammer to break it and retaining walls made of rock, all to protect them from Australia’s notorious wildfires.

Their defenses turned out to be no match for a rapacious fire so hot it evaporated their outdoor furniture, leaving behind ghostly imprints reminiscent of those after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. ...

They knew the fires would come, and had successfully fought two before.

On Dec. 21, Justin was ready, watching the progress of the flames from his roof with binoculars. The couple and their 16-year-old son, Gabriel, who was on Christmas break from school, had been raking and wetting down the areas around the house. The had filled buckets, emptied gas cylinders, put on their smoke masks and left two vehicles running in the driveway, just in case.

But this fire was like nothing they had ever seen. A wall of flame came up the valley. A fireball rose 60 meters (200 feet) into the sky. The flames were so hot they were swirling, and not only moving with the wind, but also against it.

The family raced to douse embers on one side of the house only to find the flames approaching from a different direction. ...

As the family members ran from their house, Helena’s shoes melted and embers landed on her shoulders. She believes they made it out by no more than 30 seconds. The back of their car had melted, so they jumped into their truck and drove up their driveway to the end of their street.

But there was nowhere to go from there. They were surrounded by flames.

After what might have been five minutes or 10, the fire front moved on and they drove to the fire station, where others were taking shelter. ...

And some updates from my ranch-owning acquaintance:

Monday 1/6/20 evening:

This isn't your mother's bushfire.

Word on the street is that the Wingelo fire was the result of a pyrocumulus event - a "firenado". It carved a path of destruction separate from the main fire which took on a life of its own and was completely unstoppable. 180kmph winds of metal-melting heat and lightning bolts. We're in a strange new world where fires can invoke the "finger of god" and  flip 8-ton trucks and shoot directed destruction at anything that gets in their way. We need to get smart really quick.

Tuesday 1/7/20 morning:

We've had a couple of days of cool weather and even a bit of a drizzle. It's not enough to affect the fire in any serious way or even replenish our mostly depleted water supply, but it gives us time to prepare for the next round when it runs again; possibly Friday.

Tuesday 1/7/20 afternoon:

A lot of people here have had it really rough. I'm (so far) one of the lucky ones. The south coast got hammered in a way that words can't describe. Many people around here look like they've just been through a  war zone - that's the best description I've seen. Everybody I've talked to has a story of tragedy that touched their life, if not directly, to somebody close. They're all sad, but resilient. But most of all they're angry in a way words can't describe. This place is a powder keg.

[Mr. Bill]

Reuters, 1/9/20: Australia urges quarter of a million to flee as winds fan huge bushfires

...“Even with rain in Melbourne, even with forecast better conditions next week, there is a long way to go in what has been an unprecedented fire event...and, of course, we know that we have many weeks of the fire season to run,” Daniel Andrews, the premier of Victoria, told a televised briefing.

“The next few hours are going to be very, very challenging.”  ...

Authorities sent emergency texts to 240,000 people in Victoria, telling them to leave. People in high-risk regions in New South Wales and South Australia were also urged to think about leaving, but officials did not say how many.

Since October, 27 people have been killed and thousands subjected to repeat evacuations as huge and unpredictable fires scorched more than 10.3 million hectares (25.5 million acres) of land, an area roughly the size of South Korea. ...

Westpac estimated total bushfire losses to date at about A$5 billion ($3.4 billion), higher than the 2009 bushfires in Victoria but smaller than the Queensland floods in 2010/11. It forecast a hit of 0.2% to 0.5% on gross domestic product. ...

Australia’s wildfires have dwarfed other catastrophic blazes, with its burned terrain more than twice the extent of that ravaged this year by fires in Brazil, California and Indonesia combined. ...

Just shy of 2,000 homes have been destroyed in New South Wales, state authorities said, half during the past 10 days. ...

[Mr. Bill]

NPR, 1/10/20: Australia's Wildfires Spark Disinformation Battle As They Take A Tragic Toll

...The hashtag #ArsonEmergency began trending shortly after the new year. Queensland University of Technology researcher Timothy Graham says he identified troll and bot social media accounts that tried to shift the narrative about the fires as being the work of dozens of criminals. ...

The #ArsonEmergency campaign seems to have peaked around Jan. 7, when thousands of tweets used the hashtag...

Around the same time the bot campaign hit its crescendo, news stories about the wildfires also touted a police report in hard-hit New South Wales, where authorities recently announced that they have taken legal action against more than 180 people for fire-related offenses. But only a fraction of those people face charges that might be construed as arson, and the figure also spans a period that began in late 2019.

The NSW police said that while 24 people were charged with deliberately lighting bushfires, 53 faced legal actions — which include a warning — for not complying with a statewide ban on fires. And the overall number also includes 47 people who were accused of not properly disposing of lit cigarettes or matches. ...

Experts say the intense and widespread effects of Australia's wildfires are related to a number of factors, from the destructive nature of wind-borne embers — which swirl high into the air and help fires spread rapidly and unpredictably — to building standards that allow houses to be constructed out of flammable materials and planning regulations that don't enforce enough of a buffer zone around houses built in vulnerable areas.

Australia's fires are spreading more quickly and ferociously because of prolonged drought and hot weather — both of which are exacerbated by climate change — are providing copious dry fuel.

According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, most of bushfires that are started by arson only burn around five hectares — a little over 12 acres of land. The government crime agency says most arson fires are started by young people in disadvantaged areas. ...

[Mr. Bill]

Quote from a random Russian guy on social media:

CO2 level increase is good for plants and nature...  All these arson attacks are an attempt to justify planned extension of the [Kyoto] protocol.

This was directed at my Australian acquaintance, and I 'm quoting his response below.  Agree with him or not, as you prefer, but take this as a sample of how he and (I believe) many Australians are feeling right at this moment:

...I really don't have the inclination to debate as I'm on ember duty all day today. How the fires started isn't my concern; although the image of teenagers hacking their way through the national forest with machetes and petrol containers strapped to their back and rappelling into steep gorges to set fires miles from civilisation in order to save the planet is an amusing one. ...

Sure, plants do well in CO2 rich environments. I'll cede that point. They breathe the stuff. Not so good for humans, who don't.  What also apparently happens with increased CO2 is that it gets warmer. My plants aren't doing so good after all those 40+ days and not enough rain in the last two years to fill a coffee cup. You know what happens? They stop growing and they bloody die. Is CO2 the cause? The evidence seems to point that way, but I don't care what the cause is. My farm has been destroyed by whatever happened to the climate and I'm trying to keep the house from burning down. You can believe whatever you bloody want.

[FreeLancer]

Firestorms are not easily created at will, they're critically dependent on the physical conditions of the fuels and weather.  Just look at WWII firebombing campaigns, for instance. 

In mid 1943, Hamburg's incendiary bombing with napalm, white phosphorus, thermite, magnesium, and high explosives was successful due to the right mix of environmental conditions that allowed it grow to apocalyptic proportions.  The code name Gomorrah turned out to be an appropriate moniker for this military operation. 

The next cities where firebombing created similar firestorms and destruction were Dresden and Tokyo in 1945.  The absence of similar firestorms in the intervening 2 years wasn't for a lack of trying, it's just not that easy to pull off a catastrophic firestorm, even when the "arsonists" have massive resources to throw at "the problem" and unhampered access by air.

[David in MN]

Firestorms are not easily created at will, they're critically dependent on the physical conditions of the fuels and weather.  Just look at WWII firebombing campaigns, for instance. 

In mid 1943, Hamburg's incendiary bombing with napalm, white phosphorus, thermite, magnesium, and high explosives was successful due to the right mix of environmental conditions that allowed it grow to apocalyptic proportions.  The code name Gomorrah turned out to be an appropriate moniker for this military operation. 

The next cities where firebombing created similar firestorms and destruction were Dresden and Tokyo in 1945.  The absence of similar firestorms in the intervening 2 years wasn't for a lack of trying, it's just not that easy to pull off a catastrophic firestorm, even when the "arsonists" have massive resources to throw at "the problem" and unhampered access by air.

Yes and no. And maybe a little between. My grandfather worked as an engineer in ordinance in the 40s and Tokyo was specifically targeted with fire bomb runs because the Japanese used timber and waxed paper for construction. Unfortunately for them they basically lived in candles. Dresden required days of sustained 24 hour bombing  because of the German stone construction and to this day if you travel to many of the heavily bombed targets of industrial centers like Cologne, Frankfurt, or Hamburg (the Ruhr) all the apartments look like decrepit 1950s hastily built concrete tenements. Dresden wasn't even a military target.

I know stateside California, Oregon, and Washington get most of the wildfire press but we have days in MN where the fire marshall asks us not to grill and we've had horrible fires usually caused by campers who don't properly extinguish a campfire. Something a 7 year old boy scout knows. It seems wrong to claim that we have a fire hazard when I can walk to the Mississippi from my house but it happens. And in bad years the corn farmers are real careful because a dry corn field is just a tinder box.

On the black side of the ledger there is maybe hope. In recent memory California, Greece, and now Australia have suffered horrible fires where (sadly no joke) people had to run into the sea for safety. These are populated first world tourist spots. It's becoming glaringly obvious we're not managing this risk well. That needs to change.

[FreeLancer]

Over 60 Japanese cities constructed of wood and paper were firebombed, only Tokyo resulted in a firestorm. 

[scoop]

Here's one of the Australian arsonists being arrested.
Looks a little middle eastern to me.


https://twitter.com/i/status/1215997903396728833

[surfivor]

Here's one of the Australian arsonists being arrested.
Looks a little middle eastern to me.


https://twitter.com/i/status/1215997903396728833

No names ?

[scoop]

No, especially if it's a Muslim name.