The day after the great fire burned through central Victoria, I drove from Sydney to Melbourne. For much of the way – indeed for hundreds of miles north of the scorched ground - smoke obscured the horizon, entering my air conditioned car and carrying with it that distinctive scent so strongly signifying death, or to Aboriginal people, cleansing. It was as if a great cremation had taken place. I didn't know then how many people had died in their cars and homes, or while fleeing the flames, but by the time I reached the scorched ground just north of Melbourne, the dreadful news was trickling in. At first I heard that 70 people had died, then 108. Then 170. While the precise number of victims is yet to be ascertained, the overall situation at least is now clear. Australia has suffered its worst recorded peacetime loss of life. And the trauma will be with us forever.
I was born in Victoria, and over five decades I've watched as the state has changed. The long, wet and cold winters that seemed so insufferable to me as a young boy wishing to play outside vanished decades ago, and for the past 12 years a new, drier climate has established itself. I could measure its progress whenever I flew into Melbourne airport. Over the years the farm dams under the flight path filled ever less frequently, while the suburbs crept ever further into the countryside, their swimming pools seemingly oblivious to the great drying.
Climate modelling has clearly established that the decline of southern Australia's winter rainfall is being caused by a build-up of greenhouse gas, much of it from the burning of coal. Ironically, Victoria has the most polluting coal-fed power plant on Earth, while another of its coal plants was threatened by the fire. There's evidence that the stream of global pollution caused a step-change in climate following the huge El Niño event of 1998. Along with the dwindling rainfall has come a desiccation of the soil, and more extreme summer temperatures. This February, at the zenith of a record-breaking heatwave with several days over 40C, Melbourne recorded its hottest day ever – a suffocating 46.1C, with even higher temperatures occurring in rural Victoria. This extreme coincided with exceptionally strong northerly winds, which were followed by an abrupt southerly change. This brought a cooling, but it was the shift in wind direction that caught so many in a deadly trap. Such conditions have occurred before. In 1939 and 1983 they led to dangerous fires. But this time the conditions were more extreme than ever before, and the 12-year "drought" meant that plant tissues were almost bone dry.
Despite narrowly missing the 1983 Victorian fires, and then losing a house to the 1994 Sydney bushfires, I had not previously appreciated the difference a degree or two of additional heat, and a dry soil, can make to the ferocity of a fire. This fire was quantatively different from anything seen before. Strategies that are sensible in less extreme conditions, such as staying to defend your home or fleeing in a car when you see flames, become fatal options under such oven-like circumstances. Indeed, there are few safe options indeed in such conditions, except to flee at the first sign of smoke.
EDIT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/10/australia-bush-fires
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