Wildfire Today

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Wildfire Today

Tag: Australia

Fires rage across Tasmania

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , 1 Comment on Fires rage across Tasmania
Pyrocumulus near Hobart, Tasmania
Pyrocumulus near Hobart, Tasmania, January 4, 2013. Photo by Mic and Jo Giuliani via Twitter

Large bushfires in Tasmania have destroyed scores of houses and caused many residents to evacuate or even take refuge on beaches or in the ocean. Australia’s ABC News reports the largest fires are impacting Eaglehawk Neck, Bream Creek, Copping, Boomer Bay and Dodges Ferry, south-east of Hobart, and Ellendale and Karanja in the Upper Derwent Valley.

One of the worst-hit areas is Dunalley, east of Hobart, (map) where a triage team from the Tasmania Police is assessing the situation. They will investigate a report that a fire crew was unable to reach a man who was defending his home when the fire passed over. A preliminary evaluation from an aircraft discovered that up to 65 structures have burned in Dunalley, 15 in nearby Boomer Bay, and an undetermined number of properties destroyed at Connelly’s Marsh, west of Dunalley.

Highest temperature ever recorded in Hobart

The intensity of the fires can be attributed in part to the highest temperature in 120 years of record keeping in Hobart, where it reached 41.3 degrees Celsuis (106F) on Friday. However, the strong winds and the high temperatures are beginning to ease. At midnight in Hobart it cooled off to 31C (87F).

Smoke fires Tasmania
Smoke from one of the fires in Tasmania as seen from the Elizabeth Street Pier in Hobart, Tasmania, Jan 4, 2013. Photo by Photographywithcassie, Instagram

From the Tasmania Police, regarding the fire in the Dunalley area:

Several groups of people sheltered safely in the area; about 50 people are safe in the Boomer Bay jetty area another group of people are safe at the Dunalley Hotel. A Police vessel is in the area, checking the shoreline for people who were reported to be sheltering in the water; no one has been located at this stage.

A helicopter has been working to evacuate anyone suffering heat distress or other health issues at the request of Tasmania Ambulance Service. Another helicopter has deployed response personnel and equipment into the area.

At present the police vessels are ferrying fuel, generators, medical supplies and other items to Dunalley, and the refuge centres at Nubeena. Police are also working with Telstra to transport generators and other equipment to commence restoration of communication where possible.

Tasmania Police is working with the Tasmania Fire Service to identify options to allow people to safely leave the Tasman Peninsula, or return to their homes. Efforts are being to reopen the Arthur Highway, however this will only occur when it is deemed to be safe.

An information hotline has been established; 1800 567 567.

 

Thanks go out to Chuck

Wildfire news, January 3, 2013

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , ,
Wenatchee Complex Fire, Highway 97
Firefighters patrol a smoky section of Highway 97 on the Wenatchee Complex Fire. Photo by Jim Timaselli, USFS

Wenatchee residents endured heavy smoke

The residents of Wenatchee, Washington were exposed to extremely high levels of wildfire smoke for several weeks in September and October. The Wenatchee Complex fires, started from a storm that produced 4,000 lightning strikes, blackened over 56,000 acres.

According to the Wenatchee World:

… by Sept. 14, there were more than 1,100 micrograms of fine airborne particles per cubic meter. That’s more than eight times the level considered hazardous for human health. (For comparison’s sake, the clear-sky day of Dec. 19 averaged just 8.4 micrograms.)

Wenatchee’s smoke levels remained high for weeks, averaging 200 micrograms daily until Oct. 12 but never reaching that peak again. But in Cashmere, as smoke poured from canyon mouths and settled, 24-hour average particle counts there reached as high as 928 micrograms between Sept. 17 and 22.

Cashmere schools closed for three days while officials struggled to proof them against smoke, which had infiltrated the buildings and reached dangerous accumulations. Parents in other districts opted to remove their kids from school: Between Sept. 9 and Oct. 12, there were 3,400 more student absences in Chelan, Douglas, Kittitas and Okanogan counties than the same period in 2011.

Fire burns DNR facility in Washington

Yesterday a fire in a Department of Natural Resources maintenance facility in Forks, Washington heavily damaged a fire engine and destroyed three pickup trucks. All that was left of the structure was the four walls and a portion of the roof. Some components from the engine may be salvaged even though the roof collapsed onto the truck.

Colorado Springs to hold community wildfire meeting

In the wake of criticism following their management of the Waldo Canyon fire which destroyed 347 homes last June, the Colorado Springs Fire Department has scheduled a community meeting “to increase wildfire awareness and emergency preparedness in the community”, according to a news release from the city. In addition to encouraging their residents in high risk areas to prepare for the inevitable wildfires, the city has a lot of room for improvement in their training and preparedness.

Coulson modifies 2 helicopters for night flying

Coulson Aviation has modified two helicopters so that they can fight fires at night. More information is at FireAviation.com

Extreme fire danger in Victoria

Our friends down under in Victoria will be experiencing extreme bushfire danger in the southwest part of the state on Friday, with the danger in the rest of the state rated as severe. Temperatures will be above 40C (104F) until the middle of next week. Heat health alerts were issued by the chief health officer for the central and north central districts, taking in Melbourne, Geelong, Ballarat, Marysville and other townships.

Video of helicopter crash in ocean off Brazil coast

The four crewmembers of a fire department helicopter walked swam away from their helicopter after it crashed into the ocean off the coast of Copacabana beach in Brazil. Check out the video HERE. The crash occurred while they were attempting to rescue a stranded swimmer.

The Rio de Janeiro state fire department blamed the incident on an undetermined mechanical failure.

 

Thanks go out to Dick

Australia to implement technology to aid firefighters suppressing bushfires

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags

Planners and researchers in Australia are expecting to implement in the coming years new technology, including drones and social media data, to assist firefighters suppressing bushfires.

The Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission that studied the Black Saturday fires of 2009 said there was a need for more “forward looking research”. With predictions that the fire season that is getting started will be the busiest since 2009, firefighters are looking for additional methods to protect wildlands and the public.

Here are some excerpts from an article at sbs.com:

[Dr Allison Kealy, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Department of Infrastructure Engineering] says the coming fire seasons will see a decentralized information network, being fed with information from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), wireless sensors, improved high-resolution and real-time satellite imagery.

“It will even aggregate information from crowd-sourced data, like Twitter and Facebook.”

Her team at the University of Melbourne is partnered with the University of California in San Diego, and are working to design and build resilient streaming sensor networks for bushfire response.

[…]

The use of technology in bushfire communications has improved; for example the CFA FreReady app allows mobile users to share user-generated geo-codded images and view official, real-time warning and advisories.

But new technologies, more specifically mining hugely complex data sets provided by emerging surveillance technologies, won’t be used on the front line this summer.

“The gap has closed when it comes to the ability to share information this summer, but we need a more detailed and focused approach when it comes to the integrity of data capture, analysis and visualisation,” Dr Kealy said.

Thanks go out to Dick

Documented fire tornado

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , , , ,
Fire Tornado path, Australia
Fire Tornado path, Australia. Credit: research led by Rick McRae

We have previously written about events described as “fire tornadoes”, but research led by Rick McRae in Australia has us convinced that those should be more accurately called fire whirls, not tornadoes. We were never very comfortable using the term “fire tornado” for those events, but it has become common and we were not aware, until now, that a phenomenon many times more powerful existed.

Fire Tornado documentation, Australia. Credit: research led by Rick McRae
Fire tornado documentation, Australia. Credit: research led by Rick McRae

Mr. McRae documented what was unquestionably a real fire tornado that occurred near Chapman, ACT, Australia during the McIntyres Hut Fire January 18, 2003.

Researchers had speculated about the ability of a fire to produce a tornado, but this is the first documentation of the creation of a true tornado by the convection column of a large fire.

In a video interview (scroll down and view the second video) and in a paper published October, 2012 in the journal Natural Hazards, he described a fire tornado as occurring over a vegetation fire, a process now known as the phenomenon of “pyro-tornadogenesis”. Under certain conditions, a fire can cause a pyro-cumulus cloud to form, which is not in itself unusual over a large fire. If the cloud continues to build, it can generate lightning, rain, and hail, much like a conventional large thunderstorm. And large thunderstorms can sometimes propagate a tornado, which is what happened over the McIntyrres Hut Fire.

Mr. McRae’s research determined that the fire tornado was moving across the ground at 30 kph (19 mph), had horizontal winds of 250 kph (149 mph), and vertical winds of 150 kph (93 mph).

Fire tornado, broken-off trees
Aftermath of a fire tornado, showing 12-15 meter tall trees broken off 2-3 meters above the ground. From research led by Rick McRae.

Dr. Jason Sharples, also associated with the research, described the differences between a fire tornado and a fire whirl:

Tornadoes are associated with thunderstorms and as such they are anchored to a thundercloud above, and are able to sporadically lift off the ground. Fire whirls, on the other hand, are anchored to the ground and do not require the presence of a thunderstorm.

Rick McRae is a Special Risks Analyst at the ACT Emergency Services Agency.

 

Thanks go out to Chris

Helicopter drops sewage on firefighters

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , ,

A helicopter that was assisting firefighters suppressing a wildfire in New South Wales obtained water from a sewage treatment plant and dropped it on the fire. According to ABC News in Australia, Mark Hughes of the Australian Workers Union said Rural Fire Service (RFS) commanders directed the helicopter to use the sewage rather than other water sources such as  the Camden Haven River, Queens Lake or the Cowarra Dam.

There were two ponds at the sewage treatment facility near Port Macquarie, one with raw sewage and the other with treated water. The raw sewage used potentially affected up to 30 RFS firefighters. After using the contaminated water for three hours, a HAZMAT team shut down the site and talked to the firefighters.

Injured Australian firefighter released from hospital

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , ,

One of the two Australian firefighters that were seriously injured when their engine was overrun by a bushfire has been released from the hospital. The 24-year old woman, whose name has not been released, had burns over 40 percent of her body and had been treated at the at the Royal Perth Hospital.

Wendy Bearfoot
Wendy Bearfoot

Her colleague, 45-year old Wendy Bearfoot, passed away on Thursday, November 1, after suffering burns over 60 percent of her body while fighting the same fire on October 12. Both of the firefighters worked for the Department of Environment and Conservation in Western Australia.

Ms. Bearfoot joined the Department in 2003 as an Indigenous Land Management Trainee and progressed through the roles of conservation employee, national park ranger and most recently overseer in the Albany District office.

Both firefighters had been suppressing a fire in a pine plantation with 20 other firefighters near Albany when strong winds caused the fire to suddenly change direction on a slope. Three other firefighters were also injured in the burnover and were treated at a hospital in Albany.

Burned engine, Photo credit Department of Environment and Conservation
Burned fire engine in Western Australia. Photo credit: Department of Environment and Conservation