R_O_M
Guest
Thanks for asking about us mickyd. The big fires were north east of and on the outskirts of the Victorian state capital of Melbourne. The area is quite steeply and heavily forested and a very [ was ] attractive area with a lot of small tourist and commuter towns around in the area and often just a single road winding around the hills and leading in and out of these small towns so access is not fast or easy. The small towns have a lot of recent arrived residents that have moved out from Melbourne, a city of 3.6 million people. the fires were only a few tens of kilometres outside of the city. Rolf and self [ ROM ] are 300 kilometres north west of Melbourne and peng5, Bucko and others are a thousand or more kilometres north of Melbourne in the main eastern australian grain belt. At Horsham where we are located we had our own decent fire on that awful saturday. Our country around Horsham is flat and mostly open fields and grasslands but this fire still burnt out some hundreds of hectares, a dozen houses and one of Australia's top country golf course complexes. However we were lucky as we had no deaths unlike the 209 people that were killed in the big fires near Melbourne, I believe that some of the more ignorant American media has been suggesting that Australians were a little dumb not to get out of the way of the fires. The first problem was the difficult access to get large numbers of people in and out of these areas on the winding two lane roads. The Mountain Ash trees in these areas tower two or three hundred feet high and the fire crowned, it ran through the tops of the trees long before it reached the ground. The fire was spotting 6 or 7 kilometres ahead of the flame front; ie; new fires were being lit from burning bark and etc some 6 or 7 kilometres ahead of the main fire front so the fire was jumping kilometres at a time in places. With the spotting the fire was probably moving at 50 kph in places and you can't run from that sort of fire. Many people actually died in their vechiles while trying to run. The temperatures reached 47 C [ 116 F ] that day and the wind speeds reached reached 45 mph gusting to 52 mph. Relative Humidity was down to 7% and at that humidity, temperature and wind speeds a fire will just literally explode. As an example. some ceramic kitchen plates were found fused together in one of the burnt out homes. It was calculated that it needed 1000C [ 1800F ] for that to happen in the 5 or so minutes needed to totally destroy the home. Yet some historical information indicates that a fire in 1851 was much bigger and much worse than this one. Melbourne had only been settled for 50 years then and there were only a few thousand people in Melbourne in 1851 and very few settlers in the hills where this great fire occurred so it has all happened before and it will invariably happen again.