from Guardian UK by Ellen Connolly in Sydney
…flames four storeys high raced across the land like a speeding train, wiping out towns within an hour. The pretty alpine town of Marysville was flattened, street by street, every public building – the post office, police station, guest houses – no more.
Many tried to escape the acrid smoke in their cars but some did not make it, trees exploding and blocking their exit.
Victoria Harvey said a local businessman watched as a car in which his two children were sheltering went up in flames. “He put his kids in the car, turned around to go grab something from the house, then his car was on fire with his kids in it and they burned,” she told the Australian Associated Press.
Marie Jones said a badly burnt man carrying his infant daughter told her his wife and other child had been killed. “He was so badly burnt. He had skin hanging off him everywhere and he said ‘Look, I’ve lost my wife, I’ve lost my other kid, I just need you to save [my daughter]’,” Jones said.
Survivors said the devastated areas looked as though they had been hit by a nuclear bomb, and those who lit the blazes “must pay”.
“How can people do this? If the coppers can’t get them, and someone else finds them, they’ll kill them,” Jarrod Champion, who found the body of a friend, told The Herald Sun. Jay Cherie from Kinglake Central told ABC her family had no warning of what was to come. “My little girl was saying to me, ‘Mum am I going to see my friends again?’, she also said to me, ‘Mum am I going to live tomorrow?’.”
At least 750 homes have been destroyed and more than 330,000 hectares burnt out, while authorities said some fires could take weeks to contain.
One of my books, The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About That Which Can Never Die, is dedicated to the lives of 14 wildlands firefighters and helitacks lost on Storm King Mountain in the Rockies in 1994… those men and women on the fireline were trapped and died when the fire ‘jumped and turned on them.” The could not outrun the wall of fire as it came roaring up the mountain face that was deep with vegetation. Fire in wind is wicked unpredictable and more like a tsunami wall of fire than a mere ground blaze. It is not true that green wood and plant material do not burn. They do, and ferociously well, the tall trees especially providing rungs for the fire to climb.
I remember the sorrow, and the aftermath of that time well, hands on.
Tonight, the lands where the fires are burning in Australia, one of the places on earth along with New Zealand that I love fiercely– for its people are rare and unusual, strange and often hugely generous, and filled with humor. Unfortunately tonight, many of the fires are heartbreakingly in areas populated by families as well as hand-to-heart beautiful green primal forests in full leaf now.
I know there will soon be aide news on the wires. When we receive it, we’ll pass it on to you, so we all can see how we might help our Aussie brothers and sisters.
In the meantime: please join me in your own way: May the air to be stilled over the wildfires, may the firelines be strong and hold, may there be plenty of helpers and smokejumpers now and asap from the nations, and they be kept safe, may the injured be found and those in need find their ways to those who can help them and hold them in the most useful ways possible… and along with every last human, may all the creatures, both domesticated and wild, be able to outrun the fire.
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CODA:
on the map above, you see the land mass in hectares. One hectare is nearly 2.5 acres. So the largest fire is about 812 square miles big, and if my calculations are close, that one fire is equal to about 3/4 quarters of the topography of Rhode Island.