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 ?

Highly unlikely, individual, but you'd need to look at all the building components including materials inside a house that could readily if fire enetered through a window broken by direct flame exposure etc.

Bernie Masters,
Of course but the ground could open up also & swallow the whole house !

Yep the science is settled even back in 1950's. The climate just keeps changing. The only difference is that some fools think they can stop the climate changing by not mining coal.

Don disingenuously, I believe, tries to draw comparisons with fires as far back as the late 1800s. And in his haste to reach certain conclusions? Left out a few factors that might have influenced outcomes?

The first being our total populations at the compared events and therefore the available volunteers!

He just completely ignores the serious shortage of diesel fire trucks during the 1800s, the sparse and vastly separated bush fire brigades. The serious deficiency in diesel-powered graders and dozers and the distinct lack of water-bombing aircraft!

And water storages operated by electric pumps or diesel backups?

Were these same deficiencies, the order of the day today? Sydney would be a wall of fire decimating the city! And Black Sunday in Vic would have claimed far more many lives!

One notes also as big tobacco and asbestos were being reviled by the medical profession, the scientists employed by the foregoing, had one message for their employers and another for the average mug?

Not all that long ago it was widely reported through major media, that that same thing was occurring inside the fossil fuel industry. And, hardly surprising!?

I believe these rampant fires and their catastrophic consequences and the response by our review addicted pollies! Will play well during the very next polls that actually count!

And I'm sure will want to review the review then that again in turn so they can kick this can down the road until they retire on generous pensions and eke out their retirements on speaking tours etc, in air-conditioned and secure comfort until their respective passings?

For mine, their respective taxpayer-funded pensions and entitlements should rely on how well they've actually addressed their employer's concerns and not how much they spin outcomes and blame shift responsibility, for effective and real action!

To date, their deplorable history in this area would have me say, about your pensions and entitlements? You can go and kiss my Kester!
Alan B.

Alan B,
By his own admission Don's an Academic, logic & pragmatism don't play into it !
One of the reasons progress in anything requiring a dose of logic is always hindered by the "experts".

Alan B..,

You would be more persuasive if you abandoned attacks on the writer. You don't know me, and your assumptions about who I am and what I think are yours, usually inaccurate. For the record, I haven't been an academic for 33 years, live in an 'aged care facility', and am in my 83rd year. I write as I wish, trying always to be dispassionate and fact-based. Yes, of course I might miss a fact or two, and I think facts are most important.

You are right about differences. I limit my essays to about 1200 words, or I might have pointed out that the ratios of deaths from fires of this kind need to be set against the sizes of the population, of Victoria, for example, at the time. If you do that, the fires in the past were just as or more destructive than the recent ones.