Black Saturday Fires

The **Black Saturday Fires** represent a group of bushfires that took place in February 2009 and took 173 lives, the most in Australian history due to a bushfire.

## Background

In the lead up to the day of the fires, there were a number of days that reached over 40 degrees centigrade. This included three days in a row from January 28 to January 30, 2009, where the maximum temperature in Melbourne was over 43. This included a day of 45.1 degrees - the third highest in the city's history to that point on January 30. For the next seven days the maximum temperature was only below 30 degrees twice with the lowest being 28.5. The overnight temperature never went lower than 16. The day before February 7, 2009, the Bureau of Meteorology was predicting extreme heat and the Premier of Victoria, John Brumby, followed up calling for everyone to exercise common sense.

## The disaster itself

### Black Saturday itself

A fire that began on February 4 in Bunyip, south west of Melbourne, was already causing concern. In anticipation of trouble, over 350 personnel from the Country Fire Authority and the Department of Sustainability and Environment were placed on alert across the state. The Bureau of Meteorology had also declared a day of Total Fire Ban. As predicted, mid morning winds picked up to speeds in excess of 100 kilometres per hour ahead of a cool change expected later in the day. Fires sprang up in various locations.

Just before midday, an incident occurred that sparked the fire that would do the most damage. The wind - at 125 kilometres per hour at the time - took advantage of a poorly connected power line at Kilmore East and blew it down. The resulting sparks started a fire in the worst possible conditions, and blowing south it hit a pine plantation and spread quickly towards Wandong. All attempts to contain it failed and the Hume Highway - the main thoroughfare between Melbourne and Sydney - was closed.

As the afternoon progressed another fire was spotted near Marysville. It was shortly after this that the Melbourne temperature reached it's peak for the day - 46.4 degrees centigrade, breaking the record of 45.6 on Black Friday in 1939. The Kilmore East fire was headed further south east reaching Kinglake and Strathewen. Across the state as many as 100 fires were burning.

At 5pm the cool change arrived in Melbourne, switching the wind direction from the north west to the south west. Half an hour later the change reached the fire fronts, pushing the Kilmore East fire up towards Flowerdale and the other fire that had already hit Narbethong up towards Marysville. The cool change was not accompanied by any rain and both fires were totally out of control.

### Consequent days

While Sunday February 8 was a much cooler day, the dry conditions allowed the fires to continue and things got worse as the Kilmore East and Marysville fires combined as one big fire front. In effect, the whole of the Great Dividing Range north of Melbourne was on fire - mimicking the effect of being surrounded by fire as had been the case on Ash Wednesday in 1983. The fires continued to burn for the rest of February, but most of the damage had already been done on Saturday. Small pockets of rain on Sunday morning had virtually no effect.

Other smaller fires also burned in Beechworth, Bendigo, Redesdale, Churchill, Horsham, Coleraine and Weerite.

It would not be until early March that the major fires were contained and consequently extinguished.

## The effects

The majority of losses took place in the Kilmore/Marysville fire complex. Over 1,800 homes were destroyed as well as a number of commercial buildings, and 159 lives were lost in that region. Other fires also claimed lives - the total being 173. This included 38 in Kinglake and 34 in Marysville. One of the Kinglake fatalities was popular former Melbourne TV newsreader Brian Naylor, who even rated a mention in Parliament in Canberra in a condolence motion by the then Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.

The Kilmore/Marysville firestorm at it's height was compared to 1,500 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

The total number of fatalities was the worst death toll from bushfires in Australian history and the ninth worst in the world. It is also the second highest death toll from a natural disaster in Australian history behind Cyclone Mahina in 1889 striking Bathurst Island.

## Royal Commission and other responses

A Royal Commission was called by the Victorian government, which revealed the power line issue in Kilmore East as well as communications issues. A similar issue also started the Beechworth fire. The communications issues related to people preferring to wait for direction rather than acting on their own, and the slow response by said authority. This incorporated the two clear authorities in firefighting - the Metropolitan Fire Brigade and the Country Fire Authority - plus Victoria Police.

The power provider, private company SP Ausnet, were heavily criticised and consequently faced a class action lawsuit for their neglect of the supply lines that led to both the Kilmore East fire and the Beechworth fire (especially the former). It was settled out of court in 2014 for nearly 500 million dollars.

The previous five tier fire warning system was changed to a six tier version with a number of changes put in place.

The community responded to the pleas for help tremendously. Three appeals - one base, one Red Cross and one Salvation Army - raised nearly 700 million dollars for the victims and the communities affected. Two sporting events were converted into benefits for the victims. The one day cricket match between Australia and New Zealand was made into a match in which the proceeds would be donated to the appeal. Like the football match between the Western Bulldogs and Essendon, originally scheduled for Darwin, was moved to Melbourne's Docklands Stadium for the same purpose. In Sydney a special T20 match between a team led by Steve Waugh and a team led by Mark Taylor also raised funds.

On March 14, Australian entertainers ran an event called Sound Relief which contributed to the Red Cross Appeal with all the proceeds from the Melbourne concert at the MCG going to it as well as half of the Sydney concert (the other half went to the Queensland flood victims, but a number of the recipients re-directed their grant back to Victoria). The Melbourne concert attracted 80,518 people in the biggest crowd for a rock concert at the venue ever.

## Opinions

* I'll probably never know for sure, but I think I may have been the first person on the Internet to christen this day as Black Saturday (on the following day when I first uploaded my article on this on my old website in it's original form). As if there wasn't enough evidence of the effects of climate change, this was a huge wake up call. I know that while Melbourne got to 46.4, the highest temp in the state was at nearby Avalon at 47.9. I was living in Ballarat where it reached 44.1. We got the cool change at about 4pm. Black Saturday was a stark reminder of the perils of the Tree Change mentality. The new system has been okay, with a warning put out for a fire in Mount Clear on December 31, 2009 - a southern suburb of Ballarat not far from our home. Our fire plan is to stay and defend - because we have no transport of our own and no friends or family to help evacuate at short notice. **TLPG** 10:43, November 14, 2020 (UTC)