Victorian fire threat grows into a conflagration.

Here is a link to an extraordinary Victorian Government video of the fire threat for Victoria over this coming weekend.

This is a satellite photo showing smoke from the Victorian Alps fires.

The smoke is coming from fires in the alpine spine of eastern Victoria, and the smoke is drifting south east, towards the Gippsland coast.

We are looking at hundreds of square miles of smouldering, burnt out forest. There are countries in Europe with less area than has been burnt in these fires.
This is a potential fire holocaust.

This map shows the same area, the central region of Gippsland (the eastern end of Victoria) in pale brown tones. This is the area which is already on fire, or might be, over the next four days.

There are some fifty separate fires, caused by lightning, but the risk is that they might merge into a single huge fire, as temperatures heat up, and north westerly winds increase over the next few days.

*****

Global warming and climate change at work? Lets just say, these areas have been suubject to huge fires before, most recently in 2002 (in January), and in 1939, the most terrible fires since European settlement of Victoria in the mid 1800s. That fire burnt at the end of summer, on the original "Ash Wednesday" fires.

But these fires are burning in early December. Some started in November. It is too early. How will the forests be coping at the end of a long, hot summer?

It is time for the Federal Government to wake up, and realise that not only is this an emergency, it is part of a pattern which the Government has denied for years.

This is climate change bearing fruit - burnt fruit.