Scores killed in Australia's 'worst fires'

[Breaking News Breaking News]

(CNN) -- At least 96 people have been killed in Australian wildfires that the country's public broadcaster Sunday called the worst in the nation's history.

Kendra Jackson, leading senior constable of Australia's Victoria state police, told CNN the latest death toll Sunday. The number of dead is now far higher than the toll of 75 in the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983. Close to 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of land have burned.

Thousands of weary firefighters spent Sunday fighting a losing battle to contain the flames.

"It's an absolute feeling of helplessness," said Michelle Achison, who lives in a suburb of Victoria, the state most affected. "There are communities that are completely flattened. There's nothing at all. And each and every one of us knows somebody who will lose everything."

The death toll seemed to rise every hour Sunday as rescue workers discovered more bodies. Some victims perished inside cars while trying to flee the flames. Others had stayed put inside houses that were burned to their shells. Watch as deadly fires rage »

"I've heard of sad stories of flames going over cars and maybe one person surviving," Dr. John Coleridge of Victoria's Alfred Hospital told reporters Sunday. "I suspect today they will find lots of cars with people who haven't survived."

Hospital officials treating burn victims said the wounds were the worst they have seen since the terrorist bombings in the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002.

"Hell and all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria in the last 24 hours," Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told reporters while touring the fire-ravaged areas. Watch as officials react to wildfires »

Rudd announced the creation of a AU$10 million ($6.7 million) relief fund to immediately assist the more than 600 families that have lost homes to the blaze. He also promised troops would be deployed to help fight the flames.

All day Sunday, winds fanned flames into local towns, where the blazes spread with frightening speed, devouring homes.

Residents -- with handkerchiefs covering their faces -- pointed garden hoses at the flames or tried to stamp out hotspots with towels and clothes, but to no avail. Photos: Bushfires leave path of destruction »

"All I got left is what I stand in and a bag," a woman told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, before breaking down. "My house. My house of 25 years is gone. I worked so hard for that house."

No one in the area was unaffected. John Brumby, the premier of Victoria, said the fire stopped just outside his parents' house in the western part of the state.

"There was a intense few hours for me," he told ABC. "I was too far away to get there, four hours away. Dad's in his early 80s, mom a bit younger. But we couldn't get them on the mobile (phone), we couldn't get them at home. No one knew where they were."

So many people have brought donations to relief centers in Victoria that the police have asked them to stop.

"Police appreciate that people want to help the victims of the fire," senior constable Wayne Wilson said in a statement, but added: "The number of people bringing items to the centers is causing difficulties in the operation of these centers."

As darkness descended, the flames continued to lick the night sky. Aerial views showed rivers of orange trickling in all directions amid the dense vegetation.

"You look up at the sky and there's this orange glow. It's eerie," said Ethan Alexander, a Melbourne photographer who visited some of the affected areas.

More than 640 houses had been destroyed, said Sharon Merritt of the country's Fire Protection Association.

Victoria police are investigating the possibility that at least two of the fires were set deliberately, said Superintendent Ross McNeill, adding that no arrests had been made.

Kieran Walshe, the deputy police commissioner for the state, said: "When you look at the way fires started, you can clearly see it's not possible for a natural ignition to occur."

A man was charged with lighting fires in the neighboring state of New South Wales, police there said.

The 31-year-old Killarney Vale man was due in court Monday after being arrested on Saturday, they said.

The largest blaze was centered in the Kinglake area, about 80 km (50 miles) northeast of Melbourne, the Australia's second most populated city and the capital of Victoria.

One silver lining amid the devastation: the fires have not posed a significant threat to more populous areas, including Melbourne, as they sweep across rural outskirts of southeastern Australia, Walshe said.

Still, said Achison, the Victoria resident, the state is so dry from lack of rain that there are no safe areas.

"Last night, there was a grassfire on flat dry grass on one of the properties. And within minutes, six homes in a row were burned to the ground," she said. "These weren't people who were preparing to evacuate because they were told they weren't in any danger."

Wildfires are an annual event in Australia. But this year, a combination of factors has made them especially intense: a drought, dry bush and one of the most powerful heat waves in memory.

Temperatures in parts of Melbourne reached 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit) in the last few weeks. Dozens of heat-related deaths have been reported.

By Sunday, the temperatures had dropped to the mid-20s in the area. Officials were hoping for some help from milder weather moving in. Droplets of rain had started to fall in some areas.

Northern Australia, on the other hand, is grappling with a different problem. Sixty percent of the state of Queensland was flooded, officials reported, and residents were warned to be on the lookout for crocodiles in urban areas.

CNN's Saeed Ahmed, David Ariosto and Helena DeMoura contributed to this report.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/02...index.html

[Richard]

I hope all our Australian members are ok. I noticed Astrojewels hasn’t been on the forum for a couple days now. Maybe it would help if everyone here visualizes rain putting out the fires.

[Astrojewels]

I am here, there has been no rain, the fires are slowly getting under control as the weather cools and our town is still on alert, but continues to be safe and one of the lucky ones, so we are fine. It is just a terrible situation. thanks

[Richard]

That’s a relief, I’m glad to hear you’re fine.

[Astrojewels]

It is just wild Richard, I knew all this dry hot weather would have an impact, but this is totally amazing, there are whole towns gone, and many of these fires have been purposely lit, these people should be charged with murder not arson.

[DreamTime]

Sorry to hear about the fires. Glad to hear you are okay.

Now we need to hear from the other Aussies out there...AndrewX, Reader, Rodrigo, Aethah, Archangel_Josh, Crystal Sun, Dusty Jim, eagertolearn, Estrella, Evasius, Hoystyler, Shawn, Sueb, and anyone else who I may have been missed.

[Rod]

Perth has been lucky, hot some days, but no fires as such, i feel for those gone over east though, its just so sad that this has been happening, and I agree with Astro, these peeps who are lighting the fires should be put away for life!

[Breaking News Breaking News]

Two charged with arson after deadly Australian wildfires

Two people have been charged with arson after wildfires raged through southeastern Australia at the weekend, killing at least 108 and destroying more than 750 homes, police said on Monday.
 
Last Updated: 12:44AM GMT 09 Feb 2009

A 31-year-old man accused of lighting a major blaze that burnt through about 495 acres of bush land in Peats Ridge on the New South Wales central coast was due in court on Monday after spending the night in a jail cell.

A 15-year-old boy who allegedly set off an explosive that started a small scrub fire in the Blue Mountains near Sydney on Sunday was released on bail after being charged and will appear in court next month.

Neither of those fires killed anybody, but police suspect that arsonists were also behind some of the major fires in neighbouring Victoria state, where all of the fatalities occurred.

Victoria state police commissioner Christine Nixon said all bush fire areas will be treated as crime scenes to determine if arson was involved.

"At this stage we have a team at the fire at Churchill, in the Gippsland Valley, which is certainly one that we believe was deliberately lit," Ms Nixon said.

"Our fire experts and our own investigators have suggested that the way that it happened, how fast that it happened, that there is good evidence to believe that it was lit."

Forensic investigators have also begun work in the Kinglake area where hundreds of homes were destroyed.

"Wherever a death has occurred, we investigate that as a crime," Ms Nixon told ABC radio.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Monday that arsonists were guilty of mass murder.

"What do you say about anyone like that - there are no words to describe it other than mass murder," Mr Rudd said.

Arsonists, who are believed to have taken advantage of tinder-box conditions after a heatwave and gale-force winds, could face life in jail if they are convicted on murder charges, police say.

The government's Australian Institute of Criminology released a report last week which said half of the nation's 20,000 to 30,000 bush fires each year are deliberate.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...fires.html

[Breaking News Breaking News]

Australian fire zone a crime scene; 166 killed

By TANALEE SMITH, Associated Press Writer 
2 hrs 35 mins ago
 
WHITTLESEA, Australia – Police declared incinerated towns crime scenes Monday, and the prime minister spoke of "mass murder" after investigators said arsonists may have set some of Australia's worst wildfires in history. The death toll rose to 166.

There were no quick answers, but officials said panic and the freight-train speed of the fire front — driven by 60 mph winds and temperatures as high as 117 degrees Fahrenheit (47 C) — probably accounted for the unusually high toll.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, visibly upset during a television interview, reflected the country's disgust at the idea that arsonists may have set some of the 400 fires that devastated Victoria state, or helped them jump containment lines.

"What do you say about anyone like that?" Rudd said. "There's no words to describe it, other than it's mass murder."

From the air, the landscape was blackened as far as the eye could see. In at least one town, bodies still lay in the streets. Entire forests were reduced to leafless, charred trunks, farmland to ashes. Victoria police spokeswoman Christie Pengally said the death toll as of late Monday was 166.

At Kinglake, a body covered by a white sheet lay in a yard where every tree, blade of grass and the ground was blackened. Elsewhere in the town, the burned-out hulks of four cars were clustered haphazardly together after an apparent collision. Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio reported a car in a small reservoir, the driver apparently steering there in desperation.

"What we've seen, I think, is that people didn't have enough time, in some cases," Victoria Police Commissioner Christine Nixon told a news conference. "We're finding (bodies) on the side of roads, in cars that crashed."

But there were also extraordinary tales of survival.

One man leapt into his pool to escape the flames as they roared over his house, leaving it unscarred but razing his neighbor's. Another woman sheltered with her children in a wombat burrow as the worst of the fire passed.

Mark Strubing took refuge in a drainage pipe as his property outside Kinglake burned.

"We jumped in the car and we were only literally just able to outrun this fire. It was traveling as fast as the wind," Strubing told Nine Network television news.

He said he and a companion rolled around in the water at the bottom to wet their clothing as the flames started licking the pipe: "How we didn't burn I don't know."

Elsewhere in Kinglake, Jack Barber fled just ahead of the flames with his wife and a neighbor, driving in two cars packed with birth certificates, insurance documents, two cats, four kittens and a dog.

"We had a fire plan," he said Monday. "The plan was to get the hell out of there before the flames came."

With their escape route blocked by downed power lines and a tree, they took shelter first at a school, then — when that burned — in an exposed cricket ground ringed by trees, where they found five others.

"All around us was 100-foot (30-meter) flames ringing the oval, and we ran where the wind wasn't. It was swirling all over the place," Barber said. "For three hours, we dodged the wind."

The Victoria Country Fire Service said some 850 square miles (2,200 square kilometers) were burned out.

More than a dozen fires still burned uncontrollably across the state, though conditions were much cooler than on Saturday, when the wind surged and changed direction quickly time and again, fanning the blazes and making their direction utterly unpredictable from minute to minute.

Local media had been issuing warnings in the days leading up to the weekend, but many people guarding their homes with backyard hoses would have been outside when the wind changed, and thus could have missed the new warnings.

Jim Andrews, senior meteorologist at accuweather.com, said the combination of record high heat, high winds, gusts and low humidity created a perfect storm scenario for the fires. "I cannot fathom in my mind anything more, hellish, firewise," he said.

"Last Saturday we had the most intense fire weather conditions we have had in forecast history," David Packham, a research fellow in climatology at the School of Geography & Environmental Science at Melbourne's Monash University, said in an e-mail to journalists on Monday. He said the heat and a recent lack of rain made it clear days before the weekend that "conditions were in place for a disaster to occur."

At least 750 homes were destroyed Saturday, the Victoria Country Fire Service said.

Officials said both the tolls of human life and property would almost certainly rise as they reached deeper into the disaster zone, and forecasters said temperatures would rise again later in the week, posing a risk of further flare-ups.

Police Commissioner Nixon said investigators had strong suspicions that at least one of the deadly blazes — known as the Churchill fire after a ruined town — was deliberately set. And it could not be ruled out for other fires. She cautioned against jumping to conclusions.

The country's top law officer, Attorney General Robert McClelland, said people found to have deliberately set fires could face murder charges. Murder can carry a life sentence.

Police sealed off Maryville, a town destroyed by another fire, with checkpoints, telling residents who fled and news crews they could not enter because there were still bodies in the streets. Armed officers moved through the shattered landscape taking notes, pool news photographs showed.

John Handmer, a wildfire safety expert at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, said research had shown that people in the path of a blaze must get out early or stay inside until the worst has past.

"Fleeing at the last moment is the worst possible option," he said. "Sadly, this message does not seem to have been sufficiently heeded this weekend with truly awful consequences in Victoria."

Even if a house is set ablaze, it will burn more slowly and with less intensity than a wildfire and residents have a better chance of escape, he said.

Victoria state Premier John Brumby on Monday announced a commission would be held to examine all aspects of the fires, including warning policies.

"I think our policy has served us well in what I call normal conditions. These were unbelievable circumstances," Brumby said on Australian Broadcasting Corp. television.

Blazes have been burning for weeks across several states in southern Australia. A long-running drought in the south — the worst in a century — had left forests extra dry and Saturday's fire conditions in Victoria were said to be the worst ever in Australia.

In New South Wales state on Monday, a 31-year-old man appeared in court charged with arson in connection with a wildfire that burned north of Sydney over the weekend. No loss of life was reported there. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

The country's deadliest fires before the current spate killed 75 people in 1983. In 2006, nine people died on South Australia's Eyre Peninsula.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090209/ap_o..._wildfires

[Astrojewels]

DT,

I am sure that there is no fires down where Andrew lives, CS is ok, hoystyler lives in QLD, Shawn is still OS I think! Reader is from Perth and the rest not sure?

 

Interesting Richard, those fires are in NSW, but I heard on the news that they have someone in custody for the fires in Bendigo, most of these places are crime scenes because there are people missing, so it is presumed they died in their homes, the army has been sent in to search the areas that are now safe.

There is a general rule when fires approach your home, stay and protect or evacuate, however these fires were so fierce that many people did not have time to make that choice and have died, but I have a friend in the king lake area, there are a total of 210 homes where he lives, and his is one of the three that remain, that is amazing, his shed, car all burnt and the fire stopped one meter from his home.