Ten years ago...

[Peter B]

Ten years ago today (18 January 2003), an out-of-control bushfire struck Canberra. It killed four people and destroyed over 500 houses. It also largely destroyed the Mount Stromlo Observatory on the western fringe of the city. (A couple of years later, Phil Plait the Bad Astronomer visited Canberra and we took him up there. He retrieved a piece of melted telescope glass as a poignant souvenir.)

One thing that stuck in my mind was the conspiracy theories which popped up, along the lines of the observatory being deliberately destroyed to prevent observation of Nibiru. One idiot commenter claimed the actions of the fire to be impossible on the grounds of his knowledge as a firefighter.

A few days ago another fire damaged part of the Siding Springs Observatory in country New South Wales. Today, fires are again threatening homes across three states.

In Canberra the temperature has passed 41 degrees (106 in the old scale), the highest ever recorded. In Sydney it's passed 45 degrees (113 Fahrenheit), again the highest ever recorded.

[gillianren]

Yikes.  I originally come from brushfire country, so I know how scary that can be.  What are the winds like?

[Peter B]

Strong winds, but the conditions generated clouds which didn't quite turn into thunderstorms.

Around 5pm I went for a drive, and the temperature was down (!) to 38 degrees. When I got home the wind was strong enough that it was actually cooling things down so we opened the windows to let the air through (we've just had to have the aircon removed!). It's 11.20pm now and the temp is supposedly down to 25 degrees (high 70s), with a max of 27 tomorrow.

Phew!

[Peter B]

Ten years ago, though, was a bit scary.

The Friday was my last day at work before a couple of weeks leave. As I walked from work to my car, I saw a couple of charred eucalyptus leaves on the ground. They were unusual enough a sight that I actually stopped to examine them. At the time I couldn't work out how they'd got to be blackened without burning.

Anyway, a couple of fires had started about a week earlier in bushland to the west and south-west of Canberra. Some of these fires weren't fought at all, while others were only contained. By the Friday they'd spread and joined up. Then, on the Saturday we had 39 degrees with the wind changing direction and strengthening.

I wasn't worried about my own place, as I lived in a small unit in the centre of one of Canberra's town centres. In other words, I figured there was simply too much non-burnable stuff between my place and the fires. One of my brothers, however, lived in a house which backed onto grassland, and he was out of town. I phoned him to say I'd check on his place, and he was actually puzzled - he was in Melbourne and the Canberra fires hadn't made it onto the news at all. Still, he was driving home that day, due back in the late evening.

I then walked down to the local shops to buy a newspaper. On the way back home I remember being astonished to see a massive column of smoke off to the south west, maybe 10 or 20 kilometres away. I checked the radio for information, and there were warnings but no one seemed too alarmed.

I drove over to my brother's place, along a major arterial road which was the most direct route. Smoke was starting to tinge the sky orange, thickly enough that I don't remember seeing that smoke column. Anyway, I did a once around of my brother's place, but there wasn't much I needed to do or really could do either. So I drove home.

Through the day the reports started getting more worrisome. In the mid-afternoon I thought I'd better head back to my brother's place. The road I'd travelled on that morning was now closed, due to the approach of the fire, so I had to take a much more circuitous route. The smoke was now as thick as fog, obscuring everything. The only difference with fog was the strong wind which gusted blackened embers around.

Near my brother's place was a major intersection - one of the busiest in Canberra. The traffic lights were out, but there were no police controlling the intersection. With the traffic still heavy, I was worried about risking driving through it for fear of an accident, so I detoured and approached my brother's house by another route.

Once again there wasn't much I could do except walk around and check that hot embers weren't landing anywhere.

Then, fire started sweeping through the reserve land out the back of my brother's place. Thanks to the strength of the wind it moved so quickly that, while the grass burned, the gum trees didn't catch on fire. People - just ordinary folk like me, not firefighters - came running through my brother's yard and climbed over the fence to fight the fire. Within minutes it had passed, heading on to a major road about a kilometre away. I don't know what happened to it.

I hung around for an hour or so, listening to the radio to get a sense of where the fires were. Suburbs only a few kilometres away to the west and the south were being evacuated, but nothing serious was reported close to my brother's house (or my place) so I eventually went home.

Fortunately I lived in a part of Canberra which didn't lose power, but I didn't have air conditioning. For the following week or so the weather remained hot, but the wind dropped away completely. As a result the smoke just hung over the city, an oppressive, stinking orange-grey atmosphere. Every breath was a reminder of the fire. When the Sun was visible, it was pink. It was horribly unpleasant, made worse by everyone's nervousness that the fires might spring up again, and the fact that for a couple of days we were told to use toilets sparingly because the sewerage works had been damaged in the fire.

The aftermath was ugly in other ways. On top of the slack response in the week beforehand, official investigations suggested that the emergency had been poorly managed - the emergency services's communications system got overloaded, so they didn't get accurate information, meaning in turn they didn't allocate resources well and they left evacuation orders until dangerously late. In addition, their headquarters lost power due to blackouts, but their backup generator didn't provide enough power.

The blackened leaves I saw on the Friday? I don't know for sure, but I assume they were leaves blown off trees by the strong winds, in places where the fire had heated the air enough to cook them without setting them on fire. The wind had then carried them 40 or more kilometres into the heart of the city.

[Chew]

One thing that stuck in my mind was the conspiracy theories which popped up, along the lines of the observatory being deliberately destroyed to prevent observation of Nibiru. One idiot commenter claimed the actions of the fire to be impossible on the grounds of his knowledge as a firefighter.

I love the Nibiru believers. They make the Apollo hoax believers look like geniuses. No matter how many times people try to explain to them that people living anywhere in the southern hemisphere can see the south celestial pole, they maintain Nibiru is approaching from that direction.

Have you seen the "murdered astronomers" claims?

[gillianren]

Peter, that was some lovely writing.  There were eucalyptus trees by my elementary school when I was a child, and I'm told that one year, during one of the fires in our mountains, they went up like torches even before the fire got anywhere near them.  It was just that hot.  When I was in high school, our mountains (the San Gabriels) were set on fire by a homeless man trying to keep warm during the Santa Ana winds.  I was in the same situation you were--too far from the wilderness to worry about our house--but it was still pretty apocalyptic for a few days.

[ka9q]

Wow, that brings back some bad memories. We lived through two very bad wildfires here in San Diego, one in the fall of 2003 and another in the fall of 2007. Fires really freak me out because, if one hits you, you lose everything. California imported a lot of eucalyptus ("gum") trees from Australia in the 19th century; story has it that Leland Stanford wanted to use them for railroad ties but they proved unsuitable. And yeah, they're real fire hazards.

[gillianren]

I was up here by fall of '03, but during the fall of '93, there were something like twenty separate wildfires in Southern California.

[Echnaton]

We have had fires in various parts of Texas during the past few years.  Places that had never burned before.  It is interesting to drive along and see a fence with half the posts hanging from the wire because the bottoms were burned off.  Its sad to see the chimneys surrounded by charred rubble and the black trees.  We are grateful to be out of the drought in my part of Texas, but it is not over for much of the state.  Fires can be a big threat in Texas, but have not been as active as the terrible devastation in your region.  Thanks for your excellent post, I'm glad you live in a safe place. 

[Peter B]

Peter, that was some lovely writing.

Thank you. Sincerely. Coming from you, that's high praise.

There were eucalyptus trees by my elementary school when I was a child, and I'm told that one year, during one of the fires in our mountains, they went up like torches even before the fire got anywhere near them.  It was just that hot.

That's right. A few years ago in Victoria there were some fires far worse than the Canberra fire, killing about 170 people. The weather that day was so hot the eucalyptus oil in the leaves spontaneously ignited.

When I was in high school, our mountains (the San Gabriels) were set on fire by a homeless man trying to keep warm during the Santa Ana winds.  I was in the same situation you were--too far from the wilderness to worry about our house--but it was still pretty apocalyptic for a few days.

It's not pleasant, is it.