You don't expect it to happen to you

Launching this blog last Saturday 8 February evening I mentioned the following day, Sunday 9 February being "heralded as a bushfire shocker scenario". How right those prophets of doom were and here is one family who were clearly shocked, commenting "you don't expect it to happen to you" in a story in The Age last Tuesday.

In the aftermath of 2009 bushfires and subsequent Royal Commission with its 67 recommendation, many have still not woken up to the fact that bushfire can reach them in or on the edge of suburbia where they feel safe and secure in their homes and have priorities other than bushfire.

Welcome to Australia and the Australian bushfire, folks and it can reach you well inside the town boundary, as people in the Canberra suburbs found out in January 2003 and in Marysville in 2009.

Referring to the Mickleham fire, which was still burning days after it occurred, it was glaringly obvious the fire caught out many who had no understanding of bushfire — predominantly ‘grassfire’ for the purist and that distinction between a fire in grassland and a forest fire is important, as fires in each vegetation type are quite different.

With Mickleham we had all the necessary ingredients last Sunday for a severe grassfire event, lush paddocks after good pre-season rain, high temperature and low relative humidity to drain the remaining moisture from the already dry grass and the ‘killer punch’ strong wind, initially from the north then the southwest and south after the cool change arrived. Killer punch because it's wind that drives fire. At the height of summer a strong wind can at times drive a grassfire fire faster than a fire truck can keep pace.

Significantly, there are two recordings from the Bureau of Meteorology weather station at Melbourne Airport, Tullamarine that reveal that the dreaded Code Red had been entered on two occasions: FDI 100 at 11:00 hrs and FDI 120 at 12:00 hrs. The short extract from the Weatherzone publishing of Met Bureau observations shows the varying FDIs.

Weather recorded at the BOM Station at Kilmore Gap, which is close to the eastern side of the Mickleham fire, has FDI 109 at 11:04 hrs and FDI 116 at 13:00 hrs.

How people should prepare for a fluctuating FDI and respond to the CFA’s fire danger ratings presents a challenge that I will endeavour to advise on later, but at this stage it’s reasonable to contend that the statement for Code Red that “homes are not designed or constructed to withstand fires in these conditions” needs clarification — as a blanket one-size-fits-all statement it’s INCORRECT hence potentially dangerously misleading.

In my next posting I will go into a little more detail on what to expect of a grassfire and how to reduce its impact.