My home town burned

Some know I’m an Australian. Australia has been devastated by wild fires. Fire fighters from the USA have flown in to help, thanks. They are coming from every where. A dozen countries.  

Some have asked if I’m OK. The answer is yes I’m in the middle of the capital, Canberra,  and all the areas that can burn locally have been burned off. The smoke was very bad though. 

The fire got to within ‪328 yards of my parents house and destroyed businesses at the end of the street. That’s in Bateman’s bay where I grew up on the capital coast. No lives were lost there but over 100 buildings are gone.

To understand the magnitude of the disaster, and the folly, imagine that a third of Washington DC had holiday homes in Ocean City Delaware. There is no Chesapeake Bay but there is a steep mountain slope. Everything is wooded with dry forest. The main highway from the capital to the holiday resort was cut in two places and destroyed in one by fire yet 20% of the capitals population still got to the coast. The fire soon followed.
Not so happy tourists on a playing field. 

The Google map shows some of the fire damage but not all.
https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Batemans+Bay+NSW+2536/@-35.7083022,150.0969107,17607m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x6b15c02cf2703379:0x50609b490442860!8m2!3d-35.7143224!4d150.1795006?hl=en-GB

The fire swept though the northern side of town above the bay and destroyed a relatively new development above the town. It then, two days latter, came around crossing the river and hitting the south side if town swinging up into the street near my parents house. The main fire station on the hill was destroyed as were both power sub stations, all the main high voltage power lines heading into town.

Power outage picture.

The cellphone towers were gone and optic fibre system while working was cooked in the ground and will need repairs. It also destroyed half a suburb near the golf course. A light industrial suburb south west of town was wiped from the face of the earth. Refrigerated steel framed aluminum warehouses reduced to melted slag. That was the main shipping depot for all the regional supermarkets, groceries and Fedex.
The water treatment works a few miles out into the bush further south west was also damaged with ash contaminating the towns water.

All routes in and out of town were cut at one point. Remember there is 20000 tourists in the middle of this.
This report includes good footage.

In the Rosedale footage in the above report the flashes is household gas tanks exploding. Those are houses and caravans burning. Rosedale is a few miles south east of Bateman’s Bay.  My father built some of the houses there. We do not know if they are still there. There is no petrol for such minor trips. 

The fire had also gone south destroying part of the tourist town of Mogo. It found its way to the coast without destroying the local zoo. Other fires hit a dozen towns further down the coast wiping one out and driving everyone onto the beach, into the sea or onto boats.

On Friday & Saturday they had ordered all the tourists to go home to Canberra. The convoy was 200 miles long and moving at 40 mph because all the road signs, guard rails and some of the road surface was destroyed. The Kings highway; the direct route from Bateman’s Bay to Canberra is still cut with government and army engineers working on it. In some cases they the same people.
When the government tried to call up army reservists they ran into a huge problem that they were already on the job as volunteer fire fighters, emergency relief workers and road repair crews. There’s a screaming match initiated by various left wing politicians now but it should have been obvious. there is also a battle over whether the PM is allowed to take a holiday, ever, he was in Hawaii on the first day. 

Sunday a cool front came through and on Monday it rained a little. The fires died down and most are out. The power came back on for parts of Bateman’s Bay Monday night. They flew in electricity workers from all over the country and C-130’s hauled in some of the equipment.

To the south in the state of Victoria the same thing happened. People from the state capital, Melbourne, headed for their Gippsland holiday homes only to have the fire catch them. Some had to be evacuated by navy ship, some by military helicopter. The last big wild fire there killed 30!

About 20 people are dead nation wide. Some were fire fighters, some were trying to save livestock and fled too late as a result, one heart attack, one unexplained, he may be asthma exasperated by the smoke. We had a lot of near misses with asthmatics. Note: 20 people sounds bad but that’s a low number for such bush fires. The evacuations worked. 

Australia’s bush is designed to burn and survive but not like this. Nothing survives a fire storm. We had 300 Joules per square metre of fuel in places. The oxygen is burned up at ground level and in burrows where most animals flee too. All biomass is stripped from the soil. It will take a decade to recover. The fire generates 60 mile per hour winds that flipped fully loaded fire trucks and blow torched buildings and cars from 20 yards away. A fire break is useless against a fire with a 50 MPH wind behind it. Embers and fire brands, 2 yard lengths of light bark burning at both ends, travel 15 miles. There are small tornadoes generated in the fire.
There is a report here. Audio. 

What causes the fires? Australian trees, its not just the eucalyptus, drop leaves, branches and bark in drought order to reduce their water needs. The dead fall also shades and thus retains most of the remaining moisture. This did not produce wild fires before because the Australian aborigines burned off patches of bush.

The dead fall fuel is also turned over and buried by marsupial ground fauna. As they dig burrows they scatter the dirt on top of the dead fall. They also propagate an Australian native truffle, a fungi that breaks down the dead fall. The feral cat and feral fox have wiped out 90% of these small burrowing animals. If you fence out and kill off these feral animals the small marsupials flourish and you get no combustible dead fall build up. Killing cats and foxes is hard. Almost every biological control tool also kills pets. Traps and baits kill possums and quoll, a cat sized marsupial predator. Millions have been spent. The legal battles with cat lovers are epic.

To make things worse. The green left has operated a 25 year battle with fire control and forestry authorities. They have blocked burn offs: fire hazard reduction burns. Some times though law suits and state government green tape. Some times by standing in the way of the people, government and private, trying to do the burn off. Where officials and land owners put in fire breaks the greens have recovered them with dead vegetation to “protect the little creatures crossing” and “block four wheel drives that damage the forest” !?! The next big political challenge will be to criminalize these activities as criminal negligence or public endangerment. In some places these green leftist have captured local government.

Miranda Divine talks about it here.
 
Australia will recover. There will be huge political and legal battles. Rezoning. Banning high risk architecture; we have done that before but it keeps getting reversed. Hardening key infrastructure is already being talked about. Much more funding for fire fighters and new technology for back burns is being discussed. I suspect fire officers doing back burns and other hazard reduction will be given police powers so they can arrest those blocking them.

Lastly, we have over 200 fire bug arrests [bush and grassland arsonists] that’s an unusual number. Names have not been released. Both Al Qaeda and ISIS threatened to use wild fires as a weapon. Some of the fires started in suspicious places. There will be a battle to get the names released. Some state players want to hide the fact that most crimes on the rise; domestic violence, religious violence, etc are Islamists. Middle eastern and African Muslim refugees and their radicalized children.

Note: Australia uses metric but I’ve used Yards and Miles so the two countries in the world that still use that can read it. lol.