We have (and are using) various water bombing aircraft, including some from overseas (they spend the northern hemisphere’s summer up there, and then come here in the northern hemisphere winter - like the Erickson aircranes, and a modified DC10 air tanker - we have Tanker 911 here at the moment, I think - and borrowing those resources is only going to get harder as our fire season extends and so does the northern hemisphere’s).
If you’re curious, I don’t know what the 2019/20 fleet is but the National Aerial Firefighting Centre had a list from the 2018/19 season, here, including where they’re based (AAS stands for air attack supervision).
As you can see from that list or chart, most of them are smaller craft - there aren’t many of the big boys. The largest is Gaia, the modified 737 with a 15,000l fire retardant capacity, and the DC-10 which has something like three times that.
But aircraft on that scale aren’t common. For instance, there are only four of the DC-10 tankers in the world, and all the big ones do that location-sharing, where they come south for our summer then go back home and, as mentioned, that’s going to get harder to manage in future. And they cost millions to lease - AU$2.5m for the DC-10, I think I recall reading.
Someone’s already mentioned why using seawater is a bad idea that just dumps a shitload of salt into the area along with the water, and it screws up regrowth. There’s a reason for that saying about “salting the earth” Has an effect on the firefighting aircraft too.
That said, salt water has been used when there’s nothing better available, according to the NAFC.
A big Australian bush fire is literally like a bomb going off. It is not physically possible to get enough water on it to make it go out. It will burn until it hits a fire break or the weather changes.
In Victoria, the weather typically changes sufficiently to put out fires after about a week. Crews manage fire breaks, put out spot fires, and damp out after. In NSW, fires often burn until the end of summer.
If you burn frequently, there is not enough fuel build up to make a bomb-like fire. There is a continuing debate about how much burning-off should be done. In Victoria this year, we only had about 1/3 the burning off recommended by the last inquiry. Of course, if you burn off regularly, you get a managed landscape. It’s like farming. We don’t currently have agreement on if we want a managed landscape or a natural landscape.
The fire service has long been very fluid in manpower and equipment usage. Even in big cities with well funded and trained firefighters and modern equipment, the necessity of requesting additional aid from other fire departments is normal. When there is several huge events the ability to increase manpower gets used up, so not enough resources to fight such fires. I’ve seen it in NY that a state park Minnewaska burns it self over every 5-8 years as part of a natural cycle. When that tinderbox is set to pop fire efforts come from as far as 100 miles away, that’s what it takes in terms of resources for a area that has natural fire boundaries (namly the ridgeline and the end of the area of dwarf pine trees which is the main fuel source), so all and all a naturally self containing fire. That’s a lot of man power. Add to that the remote location, which often means hiking in/out - sometimes off trail, sometimes near cliffs, carrying equipment which is very heavy and very limited water if at all - and if you have water you still need a way of getting it to the fire and on the fire add to that water is very heavy. It’s just a massive undertaking under shit conditions where human efforts are naturally slow many times the fire can move faster than the firefighting efforts (and this is when you get into predicting where the fire is going to set up a defensive line - which may or may not go there and may jump the line - that also often means that the smoke, then heat then flames come, so that line can often not be maintained).
When conditions are bone dry and very windy, it’s almost impossible to stop them because they move so quickly and “jump” across barriers because they are so wind driven. They cover a huge area compared to conventional fires.
Nearly 11 million hectares burned; = 27 million acres which is the area of Kentucky, Tennessee or Virginia
You can fight the front of a grass fire, even in adverse conditions.
You can find a containment line, backburn from it, place the fire units in front of the fire to mop up any break out. Essentially the problem is one of getting sufficient resources.
In Australia the wildfires are in eucalypt forests in national parks. Under the right conditions the fire will move through the tree tops (“crowning”) and in character is essentially a BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion). The front can advance at speeds way faster than you can drive. Ember attacks can start spot fires 10s of kilometres ahead of the fire front.(I presume that this phenomenon occurs with north American fires but eucalypts are particularly prone to producing embers). Putting these out is the key component of defending property.
There is very little that the firefighters can do to put out a bushfire/wild fire of this scale, regardless of the level of resources available. Rather it’s a matter of trying to contain it until it burns out the contained area or get a change in weather conditions, in particular rain.
The main function of the fire crews at the fire front are property and life defense.
The less glamorous but more important in the long term work is on the fire flank and because when/if the wind changes that becomes a new and extended front. Contain the flank and when the wind changes the right way you have a contained fire.
You cannot stop the fire front of a wildfire. You can defend isolated properties in the path with ample water, good spray systems and possibly the intervention of water bombing, but the fire front itself is going straight over the top of you.
This is correct, the phenomena occurs in North America as well, but eucalyptus are extraordinarily flammable plants, and that’s the indigenous flora of Australia. It makes for a more intense problem with embers than occurs elsewhere.
It doesn’t help that they were brought to California - they burn nicely here, too.
For a point of comparison, Texas and Australia are roughly equivalent in terms of population (Texas has slightly more people), and Texas isn’t exactly what we in the US would call a state with a high population density, even in the large metro areas.
We’re due for rain today/tomorrow and ongoing, which I hope will be heavy enough to help the firefighters get everything under control. However, now we have a new problem - all that ash getting swept downstream may bugger up the rivers
There was an op-ed piece in yesterday’s Times by an Australian aborigine who claimed that there no massive fires in her tribal areas because they did prescribed burns all the time to keep the underbrush cleared and that they had been doing since forever as far as anyone knew.
Meantime, the Australian PM spoke to the coal miners and assured them that he was doing everything to increase coal exports (I think to India and China). A Trump clone?
Not really. Yes it is true in certain areas which have a “fire ecology”, and a political climate and enough fire combatants to natural fires. But it doesn’t have much to do with the scale of the fires we are seeing now. That is climate change, not fire suppression. It is happening all over the world, where sorts of different managements including no management at all are in force.
Trying to blame poor management of fire ecologies, or “media scares”, or lack of personnel, instead of clearly documented climate change, is just more ways of refusing to acknowledge and deal with reality because it’s too overwhelmingly frightening and hopeless.
This is how people f-d up the politics last time: they told people that drought was the same as climate change, and then when the drought ended people stopped believing the people who had told them that.
Climate change is not weather, and climate change is not bushfires. As long as you continue to equate the two, you will continue to be disproved by events, and continue to damage your side of the debate.
Firefighters say the past week’s torrential rain has extinguished the Gospers Mountain “mega-blaze” north-west of Sydney. The fire, which burned through more than 512,000 hectares after it was ignited by lightning strikes in a remote forested area on October 26, was once considered “too big to put out”.
The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) said the past four days in Sydney had been the wettest since 1990, with a combined 391.6 millimetres of rain falling.
If you have ever lived in sugar producing country, you may have seen them burning off the cane. If one of those fires gets out of control you can’t stop it. Bushfires are far worse. And now (as said) in many parts we have had non stop rain. However, far more areas have had little rain.
Sydney water supply is serviced by a network of dams.
Last week we were about 40% capacity and subject to Level 2 water restrictions.
This week the dams are up by 31.1% to 73.9%which is over a years usage across the basin without restrictions. Nepean Dam went from half full to overflowing in about 72 hours
Has an effect on the firefighting aircraft too.