Deadly fires sweep across the state of Victoria, claiming over 130 lives
EVEN in a country where flood, fire and drought are part of the national legend, the blazes sweeping across part of Australia were deeply shocking. Australians awoke on Monday February 9th to news that wildfires (or “bushfires” as they are called there) raging across Victoria, the country’s second-biggest state in terms of poulation, have killed over 130 people. More than 750 homes have been destroyed, and about 350,000 hectares (864,000 acres) burned out. It is one of the worst natural disasters in Australia’s history.
As he toured Victoria’s devastated regions Kevin Rudd, the prime minister, called the catastrophe “hell in all its fury”, and “a level of horror, which few of us have anticipated”. He asked Australians to prepare for an even higher death toll, as authorities started sifting through charred townships and farms.
Mr Rudd announced he was staying in Victoria indefinitely, putting to one side plans to push through parliament in Canberra his A$42 billion ($27 billion) stimulus package aimed at keeping the economy out of recession. And he promised A$10 billion for a relief fund for victims.
The fires took hold on Saturday, after a week of temperatures of up to 45o Celsius marked the height of Australia’s summer. Strong winds, and a drought gripping south-east Australia, made for a lethal combustion.
A mountainous region of national parks and farming lands about 70km north of Melbourne, the state capital, suffered the worst devastation. Kinglake and Marysville, two picturesque towns popular with tourists, were almost completely wiped out, save for a handful of old buildings the flames inexplicably spared. Yet few parts of the state escaped from 30-odd fires elsewhere. Flames swept through the Latrobe Valley, the centre of the state’s power-generation industry, and came within 2km of Bendigo, a historic city dating from Victoria’s gold rush of the 1850s.
The speed of the firestorms overwhelmed communities. Many victims perished as they tried to flee in cars, only to be trapped after collisions with other escapees, amid impenetrable smoke, before searing flames and heat stopped vehicles in their tracks. The fires burned houses to cinders in minutes, caused vehicles to melt and turned forests into blackened wastelands.
While some fires were started by lightning and other natural causes, police and Victoria’s Country Fire Authority said that arsonists were responsible for many others; it was even claimed that fires had been re-lit in some areas where the flames had been brought under control. Police are treating some regions where people died as crime scenes. Mr Rudd called the deliberate lighting of fires “mass murder”.
The worst two previous fires took place on “Black Friday” on January 13th 1939, when 71 people died in Victoria; and “Ash Wednesday” on February 16th 1983, which claimed 75 lives in Victoria and the adjoining state of South Australia. Other alarming fires hit Tasmania in 1967, the area around Sydney in 1994 and Canberra in 2003.
Kevin Tolhurst, a fire ecologist at the University of Melbourne, said that the authorities had learned much from Ash Wednesday in terms of improvements to co-ordination and communication. The difference this time, though, was the higher temperatures in preceding weeks which killed off even the hardiest vegetation, providing more dry fuel and allowing the inferno to spread much faster.
Already, debate has started about the conflagration’s intensity at a time when some experts are linking Australia’s prolonged drought and heatwave to climate change. Ferocious fires at this time of year have swept the parts of eastern Australia most heavily covered in vegetation periodically for thousands of years. But, arsonists aside, since Europeans settled 221 years ago the fires seem to be more frequent.
In a report on climate change delivered late last year to Mr Rudd’s government, Ross Garnaut, an economist, said there had been a “general increase” in the Forest Fire Danger Index across south-east Australia in the 34 years up to 2007. Recent projections, he said, suggested that fire seasons would start earlier, end later and be more intense. Regrettably for Australia, that report appears remarkably prescient.