Dickie with out doubt you are the rudest poster in OLO.
Australian bushland has forest litter on the floor, sometimes very dry very deep.
Our trees drop fuel for the fire most need to grow, some need that fire to have seeds germinate, will die out without it.
Aboriginals burnt the land, often, for food, and game the new grasses that come after fire .
Cold fires, not heat driven fires, lets not get too emotional, or be blinded by our common grief.
Governments could not have stopped this, YES I charge them, fire brigades, emergency services with responsibility for the stupid stay and fight advice.
To people who did not know enough not to pull down the blinds too keep the heat out? but to watch every move the fire made?
Who did not know a hose and bucket was useless in a storm from hell?
Like pedophiles to schools fire bugs to fire brigades conservationist, some times radical, are attracted to national parks and wildlife.
Often in position to write policy.
Policy that forgets the metric tonne of fuel on Forrest floor fell to burn, slowly, not rot into food not turn gum Forrest to rain, it is as it is and we have not had the thousands of years Aboriginal had to retrain it , take it out of natures hands and remake it to do our will.
Dickie, a hundred thousand like her are the problem
Please have you been at a Maori cook out? some will die horrible deaths in those dug outs, some know nothing about survival, fire breaks, burn offs, clearing shrubs will save the house too.
Learn to truly live with the bush, not die in it, well meaning fools should re think can we change our country or change ourselves?

Oh dickies vehemence is stirring… the ad hominines fairly dripping from the keyboard…

Yabby, I do concur with your proposal the dickie’s boobie prize…

a tray of anuses and

no butts about it.

Foxy “We do the right thing, when it matters!”

I agree but

It is worthy of note, some of these fires occurred in shires where the local council had a no burn off, no clearing of dead wood, no cutting down of dead trees policy which was not limited to public land but also applied to private property.

People who would have otherwise done the “right thing” before these fires are now dead because of the manic attitude of green councilors ambushing the local authority and turning the bye-laws for their own twisted sense of pseudo-conservation”

We cannot do anything about hot weather

We cannot do anything to prevent lunatic arsonists

We can do something about the control and management of the primary a bush-fire fuel source, through forest management, controlled burns and clearing dead trees

I drive along the western highway several times a week… dead trees piled up, drying out, waiting for an arsonist or lightening strike because the land owners are not allowed to manage their land, by decree of some bureaucratic flunky with a fetish for pseudo-conservation.

Negligence is a tort on common law. Failure to manage publically held land, be it national park or local common, is negligence...

To put it another way, asbestos is a health hazard and has been removed from public buildings. Natural woodland waste (leaf fall) and dead trees, because of the combustibility, are a health hazard. Yet it is dictated by local councils to be left, unaddressed, unattended, unmanaged.

a lawyers field day is coming as survivors and dependents of the 200+ dead focus their justified anger on the negligence imposed by greenie councillors who followed their personal agendas against the larger interests of the electorate.

There have been a number of posts here saying oxygen starvation is a danger in bushfires, and in particular would be a real issue in a bunker. The more I through about it, the less likely it seemed. So I looked it up.

Yes oxygen starvation can be a problem for fires in a confined space were there is a limited amount of air available. Actually, it is usually more case of the fire staring for oxygen, and producing carbon monoxide. It is carbon monoxide poisoning that kills you.

Obviously, bushfires aren't in a confined space. Worse from the oxygen starvation theory's point of view - accompanying the current fires were raging winds which literally tore the veranda off a house moments before the fire hit. Oxygen starvation under those conditions? Not a chance.

As for Yabby's comment about 100 grand bunkers. The one on TV that saved a family was a single walled Besser brick affair about 1 meter across. It's door looked to be made out of wood. That would be fine, because even a solid wood door will take more than the 15 minutes a bushfire lasts to pass through. Put a cardboard door behind a zip-zag entrance to protect it from the radiated heat and I'd imagine it would be OK too. So Yabby, I'd say your pricing is out by a factor of 10 or so.

Its so cheap, I'd be tempted to pass a law saying every house built in a bushfire prone area must have one.

http://www.cfs.sa.gov.au/site/fire_safety/surviving_a_bushfire/personal_survival.jsp

rstuart,

I definitely would not recommend a wooden door of any kind on a fire bunker. Even if a firefront only takes 15 minutes to pass through, if the fire catches on the door, it could still burn down at the fire's leisure. Metal would always be safer and should be mandatory. Zig-zag bricks behind the door would be a good idea.

I suspect that the guy that was on TV last night was lucky. Even though he took the protection of his house seriously by spraying water on his house and shed during the night, if a serious firestorm decided to go through his property, he'd have no chance of retaining it. As his house and shed were still standing, this example probably wasn't a good test of whether the fire bunker worked or not.

Re being starved of oxygen, I'm sure I saw some interviews on TV of people who said they found it hard to breathe. Not sure though whether it was outdoors or indoors. It's possible that in a really big firestorm, oxygen is sucked in to feed to approaching wall of fire, while the fire leaps into the "hole", thus providing the rolling effect that is talked about. When compounded by the burning of eucalyptus leaves (which vapourises the oil in the leaves into a fine "mist" which then acts as a rolling gas bomb), the fire and heat generated might well be great enough to leave people, even in the outdoors, of feeling starved of oxygen. For a period of time, at least.

Dear Col,

I wasn't aware that some Councils had those kind of policies.

I thought that burning-off was an essential part of land
management practice, in the appropriate seasons.

I believe that the Royal Commission will address these matters
and pass appropriate laws enforceable under penalty, including
rural Councils.

By the way, the amount collected so far for the vitims of the
fires is approaching $40 million. And that is not counting the
contribution by State and Federal Governments or donations from
overseas, including one from Her Majesty.

RobP, "It's possible that in a really big firestorm, oxygen is sucked in to feed to approaching wall of fire."

No, its not possible. Oxygen doesn't get magically separated from the air by fire. Yes, air does rush towards the fire, thus causing winds like the ones that tore off the veranda. However it has its usual 21% of oxygen in it, and it is cool (meaning "air temperature") as well. Yes, the burning of the fire does strip the oxygen from it as it feeds on it. But it also heats the air up. Hot air rises, so the oxygen depleted air swept to where it can do no harm. It is in fact the rising of the hot, oxygen depleted air that causes the winds.

As for the burning wood door - who cares? Ever picked up a burning piece of wood? The stuff that isn't alight is cold. Wood isn't a good heat conductor, so unlike a steel door the inside isn't going to get too hot and thus radiate heat into the bunker. Nobody hiding in a concrete building is going to be seriously hurt by a wooden door burning.

I didn't see the bunker on the TV clearly, but the one thing I wonder about is whether it had a tin roof. I imagine a tin roof would remain intact during the fire, but unlike a wooden door it could get very hot very quickly - well into the red hot zone. I imagine a red hot roof could take the temperature of a small bunker impossible within 15 minutes. So I would make sure there was no metal exposed to the fire visible inside the bunker - not even a door.

As for people not being able to breath - you can breath oxygen depleted air perfectly well. It smells and feels completely normal. Air filled with smoke and other rubbish is a different story - as anybody who has been in the path of a camp fire burning the wrong way knows.