Some people who spent the night on a football field in Marysville spoke to the press. They were not as safe as I thought. They spent the night dodging flames as the winds changed.

Some towns are closed to returning residents until bodies can be removed from the streets. Scenes of burnt out car crashes give an insight into the panic.

A nightmare.


Truly it is, Sins.
The major problem with wildfires is the radiant heat produced by the flame front. It preheats everything, vapourising volatiles and even much that isn't usually volatile. A rule of thumb is that, for every metre of flame height, the radiation from the flames will burn exposed human skin for about 4 horizontal metres. This obviously doesn't hold true for small flames, up to a couple of metres high but the radiation from such flames can still overload the body's thermoregulation.

As an instructor and assessor of trainee firefighters I put a lot of effort into drilling these details into their consciousness and it grieves me when I see TV footage of people fighting flames in their back yards wearing shorts and short-sleeved shirts; they are seriously foolish. Many of the flames in the footage shown of fires around Melbourne are in excess of 30 metres high; that's 100' for the nonmetrics among us. Radiation from such flames will burn at 400' away and it's no wonder that the people at Marysville's sportsground felt threatened. Most of the roads around Kinglake are in steep terrain and thus are narrow, with tall timber only a few metres from the shoulder. Even though the fireffront may be moving at considerable speed, the horizontal "depth" of flame can be so great that anyone caught in it can be exposed to intense heat for 15-20 minutes.

Sorry about all the bald facts but I suspect it's my way of coping. Almost 50 years ago Kinglake area was where I cut my firefighting teeth (and was under a truck being overrun while trying to save a house built in a gully; we and it survived) and the area between Kinglake West and Marysville was my turf 40 years ago. The friends I know about have all survived and the folkies are doing what friends do best.

But the death toll is now, according to this morning's news, 166 and expected to rise.

The 7th of February has a poor history. When the intensity of fire started being measured in Oz, the 1961 fire at Dwellingup in WA (Western Australia, for you North Americans) was regarded as the biggest; in the terminology of the day, it released the energy equivalent of 10 Hiroshima over a couple of weeks. On 7 Feb 1967, the fires in Tasmania coalesced and released the same amount of energy between 1pm and 3pm. The township of Snug disappeared, much like Marysville on the same day in 2009.

The emotional impact on the community was horrific and repeated on Ash Wednesday (liturgically and metaphorically) of 1983 in Adelaide and Melbourne and again in Canberra during January 2003. We got through those and we'll get through this but a lot of people are going to need the famous Mudcat hugs.

Cheers, Rowan