I think there are more joined up or megafires in the 21st century, for example Pt Arthur 2013 with a fire front of tens of kilometres but few casualties. These days we are using aerial waterbombing and have better communication which may help. As to casualties there may be more clueless treechangers than savvy rural workers nowadays but that is speculation.

The trouble with mitigation efforts like fuel reduction burns is that there are no guarantees. Forest thinning must have an optimum if it reduces fire damage but at the expense of CO2 sequestration i.e. both benefits and costs. If CO2 was 350 ppm we could say the fire incidence was normal other things being equal. Therefore phase out coal while at the same manage vegetation.

This subject has been done to death. People have different opinions, and it is highly unlikely that they will change their opinions. It is all about politics, not about science, as some claim.

True. The science has been settled long ago. All it needs now is the politicians on the right to get on board.
David

Isn't it wonderful how unimportant a few deaths to academics for who, human lives are little more than numbers to be crunched? (yawhol mien herr)

Was safe on the coast as the disastrous Canberrian fire took out a wonderful leafy suburb, with far too many tinder-dry pines, far too close to human habitation. May have looked wonderful and fairytale-like?

But a conflagration going somewhere to happen!

He mentions the disastrous fires in Vic in passing, just to make a climate denialist, coal-fired, acidemic's point.

Unlike Him, I was there manning one of the (Black Sunday) ambulances on the day.

And I wasn't an inherently disinterested observer, just one of the poor bastards asked to clean up and evacuate folk from desperate situations as the road burned, and power poles fell across roads making some completely impassable.

I don't have to like the completely non-empathic Author strain to imagine the terror of a fire that has crowned and is advancing as a firestorm with a windblown wall of towering embers proceeding it by several kilometres. With the speed, sound and fury of a 747 leaving the runway accelerating at full throttle as it jets skyward.

Were the firestorms that have burnt the last fodder that although bone dry would have enabled some folk to remain viable? As severe as those highlighted by the clinically disinterested number cruncher? Possibly not!? I wasn't there, neither was he and like all clinical academics totally reliant on clinical newspapers reporting numbers.

There is one very big difference between now and then! Back then the sun was going through a 200-year waxing phase and much of what transpired would have been predictable including severe droughts, firestorms and retreating ice!

However not so predicable during a waning phase of the sun and one NASA has been observing since the mid-seventies! When the place should have been cooler and the ice advancing around the world, not retreating at a far faster rate than even climate scientists predicted!

And like the droughts, floods and disastrous firestorms sweeping the globe, exacerbated by man-made climate change! TBC.
Alan B

Your suggestion of "a mile-wide area of ploughed ground between the town and the forest" makes superficial sense but in reality, under high wind conditions, ember attack can cause fire to move over several kilometres of open ground (or water) as the canberra fires you refer to attest. Far better is to do two things:
1. create a low fuel buffer around infrastructure and human assets by regular hazard reduction burns and
2. radical redesign of houses and/or radical changes to bushfire regulations so that all houses within ember attack zones are made more resistant to fire (including ember attack) so that their chances of burning down are greatly reduced. Overhead sprinkler systems, non-combustible building materials, changes to roof designs that eliminate places where fuel can accumulate, etc.

Do Besser Block houses burn ?