A prescribed fire in Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park in Western Australia escaped on November 23 and has destroyed or heavily damaged 19 to 30 homes in the Prevelly area. Pushed by strong winds, the fire has burned at least 4,900 acres.
Fifty-five people that had refused to be evacuated later had to take refuge from the fire on a Prevelly beach. They were rescued by jet ski and ferried to a waiting search and rescue boat offshore. From there they were taken to nearby Gracetown and then bused to an emergency welfare center in Margaret River.
This video shows Australian bushfires as photographed from the International Space Station in mid-September, 2011. The first part of the video captures views of the aurora australis, or “southern lights”. The bushfires begin appearing at 28 seconds.
The video is most impressive if you click on YouTube, then choose 1080p and full screen.
An engine crew attacks a fire in Australia, Feburary, 2009.
The Australian publication The Age has a very interesting article about how our culture affects our understanding of wildfire and our ability co-exist with it in a fire-prone environment. The author, John Schauble, is the Captain of the Sassafrass / Ferny Creek (volunteer) Fire Brigade, which is located on the ridge which runs through the center of the Dandenong Ranges National Park, 25 miles east of Melbourne, Victoria.
Here is an excerpt:
…In his recent book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why, American author Laurence Gonzales uses the simple example of crossing the road. People can’t naturally cross a busy street without being taught. That starts as children. ”Our culture places such great importance on that type of learning that by the time you grow up you don’t even think about crossing the street,” Gonzales notes.
Other cultures have other priorities, such as fishing skills, dealing with predatory animals or celestial navigation. In Australia, where settlement clings to the coast, we put a premium on teaching our children to swim that is absent elsewhere.
Strangely, given our fire history, the same culture places little or no importance on knowing the place of fire in the landscape. As a result, very few people have even a rudimentary understanding of bushfire.
This helps explain why people don’t automatically take safe actions in response to a fire. It helps explain why there is agitation for simplistic solutions that simply won’t work. It points to why many of the solutions proposed, such as mandatory evacuation, fire refuges and large fire-bombing aircraft, are not new.
Instead, communal beliefs about fire are often shaped by myth and misunderstanding. When tragedies such as 1939’s Black Friday, 1983’s Ash Wednesday or those of February 7 last year occur, we go through the process of relearning. Yet it seems few of the lessons are enduring.
Social, environmental and economic changes mean the impact of fire will most likely grow in coming years, probably faster than Victorians will grow to intuitively understand fire. In the meantime, the rest of us must play catch-up.
This means that when people choose to live in areas where there is a fire risk, they should understand and accept the risk…
A VICTORIAN woman is fighting for her life in hospital after competing in an ultra-marathon ravaged by bushfire. The victim, named locally as 35-year-old Kate Sanderson from Mornington, is believed to have suffered between 60 to 80 per cent burns to her body. She was running the 100km course in far northern WA on Friday at 5pm when a wildfire trapped her and three others in a small gorge near Kununurra.
Turia Pitt, a 24-year-old originally from NSW, is also in a critical condition, while two men have also suffered severe injuries.
The Royal Flying Doctor Service flew the two women to Darwin hospital. Two men, aged 44 and 56 and with 10 to 20 per cent burns, were flown to Perth yesterday.
Competitor Oskar Booth, 24, said the runners became trapped in a narrow gorge.
“As we came out of checkpoint two, we came into a large amount of smoke but couldn’t see any flames,” Mr Booth said.
“The fire seemed to have accelerated and gone up to the gorge and trapped people. I could see thick plumes of smoke and it was getting hard to breathe – that’s when I realised it was serious.”
A Western Australia Police arson squad detective and Fire and Emergency Services Authority fire investigator travelled to the tragic scene, amid fears the fire may have been deliberately lit.
Royal Flying Doctor Service spokeswoman Joanne Hill said the four people were trapped in a gorge at El Questro Station.
“They were running through the gorge and a bushfire held them up and they had nowhere to go,” she said.
In Australia, the Victorian government has decided to implement a recommendation by the Bushfires Royal Commission, which investigated the 2009 fires, to buy properties from willing owners that are in high-risk bushfire areas. Here is an excerpt from The Age (if you go to the site, a video that is far down the page and hard to find will begin playing automatically… really annoying!)
The commission recommended a ”retreat and resettlement strategy” that would be adopted ”in areas of unacceptably high bushfire risk”. It said a buyback should focus on land ”near to or adjoining public land”, and give priority to properties that were ”damaged or destroyed by the 2009 bushfires”.
The Victorian government has set aside $5 million for the first stage of the property buying project.
In other down-under fire news, the Country Fire Authority will receive $67 million to build or upgrade 60 fire stations and to acquire 101 new firefighting vehicles over the next 12 months.
As many wildland firefighters in the United States know, the Work Capacity Test, affectionately known as the Pack Test, requires carrying 45 pounds (20.4 kg) for three miles (4.83 km) in less than 45 minutes. Federal land management agencies and some fire departments require that firefighters pass the test each year in order to work on the fireline.
Some firefighting organizations in Australia have also been using it, so the Bushfire CRC decided to evaluate the test to determine its suitability for Australian bushfire conditions. Their report is HERE. To sum up their findings, very briefly, more research is needed. (An advantage of this approach is that it provides job security for researchers.)
One of the more interesting things in their report was this photo. Notice anything unusual… other than the choices of head apparel?
