Australia's Worst Bushfire That Left 7,000 Homeless | Forecast for Disaster | Documentary Central

[Music] it would be known as black saturday the spot fires crossed the road i want you out of that area we have a spot fire south at the moment which has two helicopters on it and it will rewrite the record we're in uncharted territory and our weather conditions are as bad as they can get this was a day well beyond anything that anybody had ever had or predicted something happened that day i've been in meteorology for nearly 40 years now i've never seen fires move like that [Music] it turned australia's bushland into a hell on earth it was like someone turned a volcano on the side and was shooting at our check even the best prepared couldn't escape it has been completely vaporized and you get to realize that it was impossible to get out for the people [Music] more than 170 people lost their lives when nature turned terrifying but the powerful forces unleashed that day were forged well before black saturday they were born in the skies days weeks and months before this is the story of weather and its deadliest [Music] um [Music] oh rural victoria attracts all sorts of people some work around while others just enjoy the close-knit towns and communities people have set up homes in the beautiful mountains and fertile grasslands [Music] it's a little piece of paradise until the weather turns i look at the weather every day and i'm fully aware of just how quickly the weather can go wrong how severe weather conditions can develop very very quickly but really i don't think anything could have prepared me for the sheer ferocity of the weather that unfolded over the black saturday bushfires and really just what a terrible event had unfolded for australia [Music] sunday morning february 8 2009 the horror of the night before one of the most deadly in australia's history is slowly i'd been following the weather all day on saturday but when i woke up on sunday i couldn't believe what had happened the story kept revealing itself all day and into the night and then continued into the monday morning as reports filter in it seems the impossible has happened whole towns have vanished their residents missing fire has wiped out entire communities north of melbourne king lake in central victoria was one of the worst areas to be hit it will be days before the devastating toll is realized more than 170 confirmed deaths more than 7 000 homeless 400 000 hectares scorched well everybody's asking how could these terrible events have taken place and really to answer that you've got to step back in time look at the events that led up to black saturday and place that in the context of victoria's unique meteorological conditions [Music] australia is the driest inhabited continent in particular victoria victoria stands out as one of the three uh most bushfire prone areas in the world the other two are the french riviera and we've also got california in the united states well it's my view that it is the world's worst bushfire zone in terms of the impact of fire upon people and on populations in the last 100 years or so up to black saturday there have been about 600 bushfire deaths in australia in 100 years 400 of those have been in victoria fire scientist david peckham knows victoria's deadly weather first hand it almost took his life in 1983 during the notorious ash wednesday fires well on ash wednesday our house was was burnt over the flames were over the top of the roof and the intensity was such that it it was a mud brick house some of the raw mud brick on the outside was actually fired to red brick and because we had four good able-bodied people inside they were working very hard to stop things burning and we succeeded until now ash wednesday was australia's darkest day and in this tragedy there were clues to what would happen 26 years later the same forces were at work victoria's lethal weather patterns it's one factor that makes the region so dangerous are the hot northerly winds we often get ahead of cold frontal systems and it's this change in wind direction that can also add a lethal dimension to the fires in certain weather cycles victoria is bombarded by hot winds blowing down from australia's desert interior fires start and then take a catastrophic turn when cold fronts move in at 90 degrees from the southwest this instantly creates a giant fire front the faster the wind the narrower the fire as it is on the north west spread and then the change comes from the southwest and suddenly you have got a long fire front and in ash wednesday for example 46 of the 47 people who died in victoria died on the passage of the front of the of the wind change or soon after ash wednesday was created by the perfect firestorm it wouldn't be the last and it wasn't the first when you look at the history of australian bushfires the really worst ones uh the big one of course up until this particular event was the so-called black friday bushfires of 1939 and it was a very similar role up to what we've just seen uh some of those record temperatures still stand and then the the fires erupted on the 13th friday the 13th of january 1939 black friday claimed 71 lives again hot northerly winds started the fire in one direction only to be quickly overtaken by cool fast winds from the south west it was impossible to fight and too fast to outrun many australians hoped it would never could never happen again but weather experts knew differently they knew victoria's climate and vegetation could again create the perfect firestorm it was unthinkable but it was possible with a dark history of mega fires the end of 2008 is ringing alarm bells for meteorologists like dick whitaker and jane bunn by the end of 2008 the situation had certainly looked bad things were very very dry and very hot across southeastern australia including victoria and the actual fire situation was certainly starting to ramp up for victoria what a tough day it is going to be a tough week we were coming off the back of 12 very dry years in victoria melbourne had just endured their second driest january ever and were in one of their drier spells with no rain at all a lot of this seems to be due to the fact that cold fronts that normally bring rain particularly during the winter months had slipped further to the south and this in fact has been linked by some climatologists with climate change we've seen green paddocks turn to the color of straw and uh we're also seeing the australian bush land under considerable heat and dryness uh stress dropping more leaves to the forest floor and increasing the fuel load it seems the drought will last forever then finally leading up to the bushfires strangely enough we saw some good rainfall across parts of south australia and victoria and that stimulated the undergrowth and there was a heavy uh increase in the fuel load victoria's fuel load is naturally volatile especially the native gums they fuel the biggest and fastest blazers known as mega fires well the eucalypt is pretty well designed for burning that the bark on the trees uh burns very well some eucalypt trees the bark will catch a light and burn like a cigar and and start fires up to 30 kilometers ahead then we've got all the oils that are in the leaves themselves which adds to the volatile mix we would see in those forests probably in the vicinity of 50 ton per hectare of fine fuel being available to burn and then there's all the woody material that's available and that could be two 300 tonne per hectare of woody material the brief rains at the end of 2008 simply added more fuel it stimulated growth that soon died when another hot spell set in well the good rains we saw across many parts of victoria during december abruptly turned off during january and february and were replaced by almost completely dry conditions rocketing temperatures and everything dried out it was a disaster just waiting to happen [Music] a perfect storm of heat low humidity and strong wheels had created both the black friday and ash wednesday fires and by early february 2009 it seems the weather is conspiring again yes all of the ingredients are very reminiscent of the black friday bushfires and ash wednesday it's been a horrible lead up to summer we've had virtually no rain but then we had a little burst during december that promoted growth and now a heat wave like this drying out the vegetation wind like this and pure sunshine evaporates about 10 up to 15 millimeters of moisture per 24 hours this is going to be a very tough end to summer 2009 we saw hot dry northwesterly winds pouring down from central australia right across victoria they were ahead of this cold front approaching from the bite and a blocking high out in the tasman sea these hot dry winds really brought temperatures right up humidities down they turned victoria into basically a boiling pot [Applause] a high pressure system sitting in the tasman sea that was what was responsible for most of the heat and it didn't move we had it there for several weeks at a time making this um prolonged heat wave in the week before the fires we saw an unprecedented heat wave start rolling across southeastern australia we saw a big spike in heat related deaths amongst the population record demand in energy and also record temperatures spreading right across many parts of south australia and victoria being in melbourne was extraordinary you could walk along the southern side of a building in the shade and out of the wind but you'd come around the corner and the wind would hit you like a hairdryer switched on extreme and that the air was so hot and dry it felt like it was burning your eyeballs [Applause] experts fear the worst the country fire authority and its thousands of paid and volunteer firefighters are on high alert at cfa headquarters just three days before black saturday one man is feeling the heat more than once authority chief officer russell reese good morning everybody on wednesday night i looked at the forecast and to be blunt i couldn't believe the numbers the veteran firefighter is looking at victoria's fire danger index a single number that sums up fire risk by combining temperature wind speed humidity and fuel load the normal fire danger index is designed to go from zero to a hundred we had across the state 14 locations that were above 100 some into the 200s after a string of 40 degree days when many think it can't get any hotter it does as soon as the sun cracked the horizon it was 34 degrees it's just been rising ever since it's just basically horrible [Music] we're coming to you live on the weather channel with the news that we have literally just broken this melbourne heatwave record in the last few minutes jane that's right it is confirmed we're now on 43.1 degrees melbourne has had to endure three days in a row over 43 degrees now this is unprecedented in melbourne's history and that goes back over 150 years [Music] melbourne's temperature reached 46.4 degrees which was a new record that broke the 1939 record set on black friday [Music] 60 kilometers north of melbourne at the small settlement of reedy creek liam sheehan's family are bracing themselves they know the weather is creating potentially lethal conditions the only thing missing now is a flame if you've got a fuel source you've got oxygen you've got heat and then some ignition source you're going to have a fire liam and his family will soon be fighting for their lives just 20 kilometers away at saint andrews jim beruta makes his preparations he has a fire bunker dug into the mountainside it's built with tons of concrete and steel i always knew that i needed something that if we were there my family and i we needed to go into something that we could shelter from a fire you know and like it's always in the back of our mind [Music] an entire state is on edge those who know meteorologists fire scientists and firefighters believe the weather has made catastrophe almost inevitable if last week didn't stuff the fuel in the state of victoria nothing ever will on friday february the 6th cfa's chief officer russell reeves gives a briefing he's never given before so our weather situation is we're in uncharted territory and our weather conditions are as bad as they can get hot northerly winds low humidity strong winds and a southwesterly wind change with no rain this was a day well beyond anything that anybody had ever had or predicted and that this was well beyond an ash wednesday type condition until now the deadly weather has held its fire despite the heat only two small bushfires have broken out and both are under control but tomorrow saturday february the 7th weather forecasts predict the cool change might be online to many it feels like a sign of relief to those who remember black friday and ash wednesday it spells disaster it definitely rang alarm bells you were looking at gusty nosely winds you're looking extreme temperatures temperatures were forecast well over 40 degrees you're also looking at the big one the wind change moving through a weather time bomb is about to explode a deadly recipe of weather conditions is bringing the heat wave of the century to a climax on the weekend so far we've escaped without serious bushfires raging out of control but now increasing wind will add a lethal element that has authorities on red alert as saturday dawns in cfa headquarters there's a tense calm and hopes that somehow victorians may dodge the bullet loaded in the weather's gun and the day was actually quite benign you know it looked really really like i got this feeling maybe we'll get away with this thankfully there's only one fire on the cfa's radar it's a taste of me just jumped straight in three hours all morning nothing happened it just sat there you know like this dormant lion just waiting waiting to roar but the calm doesn't last for long by mid-morning the hot northwesterly winds are getting stronger and temperatures are rising now the forecast is seeing widespread wind warnings in place in fact severe weather warnings for winds gusting between 50 and 100 kilometers an hour temperatures are up over 40 degrees for just about the entire state and there is a total fire ban in place it looked like melbourne would surpass the hottest temperature it had ever recorded we thought is that going to be a possibility [Music] on the day of the fires the meteorological observations that began pouring in show that we had reason to be really concerned we had temperatures developing well in excess of 45 degrees in fact hopeton in the maui district of victoria peaked at 48.8 degrees which is the hottest temperature ever recorded in victoria we had winds in excess of 100 kilometers per hour we had humidity's below 10 all of those things were converging to one time and that of course was black saturday and it became clear that a fire disaster was very likely to develop rising heat and winds finally set loose the bunny apart that fire got up and run and was coming out coming out with a rush and soon there are more fines [Applause] [Music] some people call it the witching hour you know like all of a sudden it happens within a space of two or three hours multiple calls start rolling in of new starts authorities are warning that this is extreme danger and we keep asking everyone to be very vigilant for spot fires fires on your properties and all residents to also really try and clear the gutters and get ready for these fire conditions 40 degree temperatures fan any flame into a firestorm we knew it was going to be an extreme bushfire day but uh once those fires got going they were just moving with breathtaking speed uh i've been in meteorology for nearly 40 years now i've never seen fires move like that and all of a sudden there were fires all across the state it was as if the state had exploded all at once one of the fires starts raging near the town of kilmore just a few kilometers from the property of liam and dale sheehan you could see this great plume of smoke and kiss said there's a fire so it's probably just a point for us good luck then i can't stand point for us because of the weather on that day as it was so hot and with that northerly wind behind it we knew that if they didn't round it up straight away there was going to be some real problems the kilmore fire is galloping southeast fanned by the hot desert winds it's throwing up embers high on convection currents they're jumping ahead up to 15 kilometers starting spot fires and extending the front we began to receive reports of wind gusts around 110 kilometers an hour and uh that's not far off a category one tropical cyclone and of course those strong winds became a major driver of the bushfires during the afternoon the fires started about eight or ten kilometers out in that direction out to the west and over a period of about three hours with fan by those hot northerly winds it then got driven south about 20 odd kilometres now this is not rain that you can see on the radar here these are the plumes of smoke that are coming up from the bush fires raging across the state it was the smoke particles that the radar was picking up you can see a big plume heading down from the northwest to the southeast those strong nozzly winds were pushing in that direction at 3 p.m another serious outbreak starts northwest of marysville like the kilmore fire it heads southeast driven by the hot winds for any fire management multiple fronts spreading quickly are enough to worry about but in victoria there's the other constant threat a sudden wind change of 90 degrees at the same time you're monitoring the weather because the critical aspect of these fires is not just that they're happening but they're going to have a wind change impact upon them what everyone fears next is victoria's notorious cold front and just as forecast which starts moving in late afternoon we saw a strong and gusty wind change charge across the state from west to east during the day affecting the central parts of victoria during the late afternoon and getting through to the eastern pass later in the evening we'll take a look at this change we can see it's pushed through areas like portland and hamilton warnabul and it's just now arriving in the southern suburbs of melbourne melbourne after reaching 46.4 degrees earlier is now sitting on 30 degrees so people opening up the houses strong northwesterly winds ahead of that blowing over the fire areas at the moment and that's going to be a real problem for firefighters tonight we're seeing in nature at its worst it's turning fires into megafires now we do have a cold front that is fast approaching the southeast of the country and what that is going to do is impact the wind direction and change the course of all these fires we've got extreme fire weather happening out there now it's currently impacting fires what sort of effect will the actual change in wind direction have on the fires well at the moment the winds are coming from the northwest so any fires that you've got burning are moving down into the southeast we do have a wind change coming so that means they will turn south westerly all of that land that is burnt is going to push that fire straight out in this direction so anyone who is to the north east of this that is a dangerous area and you should be preparing now two generations of fear is coming to life as the weather repeats its deadly pattern from 1939 to 1983 now residents in these areas should be preparing right at this very moment put your bushfire survival plan into gear make a decision whether you are going to stay and fight the fire and protect your home or evacuate the area [Music] here comes east of the kilmore fire jim beruta records the devastating force unleashed by the changing winds [Music] it jumped about 10 kilometers in about 10 minutes and then from there when it came to towards the front of the house i had the fire coming up on my my right hand side all along the ridge it was burning all the undergrowth by the house on fire next thought the front came over the first hill in the front of us and then just straight up the front across the lawn and that took about 10 seconds for that half kilometer rush not far away the fire front turns on the shien family it then blew that whole fire front from there straight back towards us and you just knew it was going to hit and just before it went warmth you looked out and you saw this great red thing coming towards you thought there was no turning back from that point there was nothing we could have done and then you realized how committed we'd become it just was coming straight at us at that point we just knew i mean there's no turning back every one of these inside the old far front suddenly becomes a potential victim the speed of the switch catches many lifeguards is one of the lucky ones the noise was so loud it was deafening just sounded like 10 jets coming over and it just wasn't slowing down it was just getting stronger and stronger it was searching for oxygen it was searching for every bit of oxygen it could find and that's the only thing that was slowing it down major bushfires do have the capacity to create their own weather uh violent updrafts produced by the fires actually suck in air from the outside you get clouds forming on top of the blaze which we call pyrocumulus clouds and you can actually have fire tornadoes that are violently rotating funnels of fire that have the the power to knock down trees and power lines once the fire gets to these sort of intensities there's no way of controlling it the whole thing is in the hands of the weather my daughter described it she said it's like someone turned a volcano on its side and was shooting it at you everything was on fire it was rolling past me and then i thought i have to walk back to the shelter where i have a bunker in his bunker and the she and family in their house are somehow surviving hell we were subjected to the most horrendous ember attack i've ever seen and we had embers getting into the house and our house actually caught fire at least eight times inside there was flames trying to get in i had a little hole that's about this big and i had an extension cord coming in it and it's about that long through the wall and it looked like someone was out there with an oxytorch trying to get in as the huge new firefront is fanned northeast by the cool change more communities are now in the line of fire king lake and marysville further east and there were many firefighters from cfa and dsc and parks victoria firefighters in that town doing their best but they were overwhelmed overnight two enormous fire fronts will become one a mega fire with a speed and ferocity almost impossible to conceive if you can imagine the wall of fire moving towards you and take a meter slice of that then the energy that's coming out of that meter of fire is measured in megawatts [Music] this fire has 10 times more energy burning at 1200 degrees the fires that occurred on black saturday are calculated out of about somewhere between 90 to 100 megawatts per meter at their peak overnight unimaginable horror approaches the mountain towns of marysville and king lake the fire accelerates as it races uphill fires are unusual and they're one of the few things that actually go up slope quicker than downslope for every 10 degrees increase in slope there's a doubling of the rate of spread of fire up a slope charging through at up to 120 kilometers per hour the fire sweeps through hilltop settlements [Music] clearly the indications are marysville's suffered late into the saturday night and our firefighters have fought valiantly there and the pre-planning was put into place to make sure our firefighters and as much as possible the community remained safe i mean it was a traumatic experience for many many people is making things worse microclimate becomes more unpredictable and intense [Music] overnight the pattern is that you still get the winds raging overhead but at the surface things can change dramatically so if you are in a valley for example you can go from northerly winds to southerly winds overnight because suddenly you get the drainage coming down the mountain [Music] and where you get gullies or valleys that actually align with the wind direction you actually get channeling and concentration of those winds so the wind combined with the convective heat coming from the fire actually add together to to accelerate the fire and the danger doesn't pass with the fire front in its wake survivors find themselves still surrounded by flames even though i put out the fires everything was still burning the bush was still burning all the trees around the house were still burning so the front had passed but everything was still alight everything was like roman candles everything there was nothing there was nothing you could look at if it wasn't glowing like a roman candle anywhere and then there's still embers were blowing through because the wind was still blowing i've been tracking it on the saturday we were thinking that the wind change as it came through would be exceptionally dangerous for whatever fires were burning but when i tuned in on sunday morning i was speechless to see what had actually happened driving through the disaster area it was an experience that changed my chemistry that made me shake now gab it's been quite a horrific morning can you give us a bit of a description on the sort of situation on the ground what we've seen is is like nothing else that you would ever see after a normal bush fire it has been completely vaporized and there's you get to realize that it was impossible to get out for the people because there's massive trees that are downed by the winds they're all just bending over like a nuclear bomb as has gone off [Music] everything was completely obliterated it was completely gone there was no signs of life at all it wasn't just house after house it was property after property then kilometer after kilometer then town after town it just went on and on and that was the biggest shock to the system of just how widespread this event had taken itself black saturday's mega fire has consumed 400 000 hectares an area bigger than sydney and melbourne combined at least 170 people are dead more than 7 000 left homeless we've lost the four four houses in here and the guys have done a remarkable job saving the rest [Music] this is um just [Music] indescribably awful and this is just indescribably awful the country's reminded the destructive power of weather and fire dwarfs any human weapon if you compare it to the amount of energy given out by the bomb that was used on hiroshima in the second world war we'd have several hundred atomic bomb equivalents and if you were able to capture the energy that was released from these fires it would be enough if you could turn it into electricity to drive all the industry and all the domestic electrical use in victoria for two years the fire's scale can only really be appreciated from space we had reports days later of smoke haze being felt as far inland as like central queensland so it went that far and we got a heap of smoke haze through melbourne a couple of days later it's going to take more than 100 years for a lot of those areas to recover so in our lifetime we won't see a lot of those forests in the same condition that they were before these fires so there's been some very long-term changes taking place although it's australia's worst firestorm there's something frighteningly familiar about black saturday the weather why did this one end under such tragic circumstances it comes down to the frontal systems during the heat wave everybody wanted to cool down we were waiting for the southerly but like black friday and ash wednesday most of the loss of life and property occurred during the change [Music] we have been through a phenomenal weather and uh fire event a natural disaster probably unprecedented so you've got all of the all of the ducks lining up in a row to give us an environment that the fire services were surely tested but the wind changed we will be under threat all those meteorological factors we saw the high temperatures the low humidities the strong winds the available fuel if any one of those hadn't lined up the fires wouldn't have been as extreme as we we actually saw 2029 homes consumed in the fires 78 townships have suffered loss of life or loss of property over 6 200 insurance claims totaling over 800 million dollars black saturday has caused more destruction than ash wednesday in 1983 the weather has a deadly history in southeastern australia as if each generation is doomed to suffer the problem with bushfires severe bushfires across southeastern australia is traditionally they've occurred quite some distance apart usually something like 30 to 40 years and by that time uh the people concerned have forgotten two or three new generations have moved into the areas in truth of all australia's natural disasters black saturday was the best predicted we had extreme fire danger forecast for that saturday we knew it was coming a long way out yet despite our forecast technology and minute-by-minute updates so many people perished so many communities were lost something went fundamentally wrong this continent about the driest continent on earth maybe we have to think a little bit harder about how we go about preparing and and living in this type of environment a royal commission will attempt to find answers for the tragic loss of life those answers are sorely needed because experts say megafires can and will happen again i think it's quite likely that we're going to see events like black saturday again history tells us that we're going to have a combination of drought with high winds and dry hot conditions many experts believe megafars will be bigger and more frequent because our climate is getting hotter now it does appear that uh these high-intensity fires are increasing in frequency and some of the climatologists are telling us that this is a reflection of climate change i'm very worried about the future i have i i happen to be a person who believes that climate change is real and that it's having a very real impact on the nature of the bush and the nature of vegetation in south eastern australia [Music] i hope it will never be repeated because it was an absolutely ghastly event however i've got to say that unless we control our fuels it will be repeated weather has always held the power of life and death in australia but now the stakes are rising we could be heading into worst worst type of events in terms of the frequency and the types of summers that we're enduring what we want to do now is to really get this right how do we look at the forecast how do we get people to safety the bottom line is we've got to save lives when confronted with a similar situation because one thing we can say with certainty is that this will happen again [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Documentary Central

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Keywords: Doco, Documentaries, Documentary, Episode, Movie, Movies, Online, Series, TV, news, abc, abc news, australia, fire, bushfire, firestorm, emergency, flames, survivor, survival, fires, flame, wind, heat, risk, trauma, destruction, video, water, alight, home, lost, utes, australian, dry, family, son, firefront, teenager, girl, teenage, victoria, danger, beach, climate change, hotter, death toll, koalas, animals, wildfires, natural disaster, drought, fire truck, escape, evacuate, rural fire service, south australia

Id: vP88LMmqFPM

Length: 41min 47sec (2507 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2022