I posted this stuff in a different forum, thought it would be good for people to be able to see how it progressed over a couple of days....
My country is burning today.
If you pray, then pray, if you don't then send some positive thoughts this way. Scores are dead, towns have been wiped off the map in Victoria.
It's really bad down there.
Up in northern queensland it hasn't stopped raining in 34 days - the towns are underwater and it's not letting up any time soon. Wish we had some way of moving even a fraction of that water down to those in Victoria.
ABC News.
Yeah it's pretty sh*t right now. Not too bad here in NSW though there are 53 fires burning across the state here and a big front coming through so we're not out of the woods.
Victoria is another story, it's just devastated, almost like Ash Wednesday in 1983 when fires combined and burnt a million acres in one day. 700+ homes destroyed and so far nearly 70 dead with that number sure to rise significantly as the fire brigades and the army start checking out all the homes.
These fronts are burning everything in their path so quickly - they're moving through the tinder dry bush at over 90km/h (55mph) and people trying to escape them in their cars have been overtaken and engulfed.
Eucalyptus trees are almost designed to burn - most of them require flame to germinate their seeds. They're full of oil and will simply explode in a fireball when they get hit. The flames at the front are over 40m (130') high and moving faster than most cars can drive in that part of the country. One blaze has knocked out 200,000 hectares (nearly 800 square miles) in a matter of a couple of days. This is just one of the blazes. We had ones a few years ago that knocked out 1.7 million hectares (6500 square miles) of fragile alpine bushland that is yet to even begin to recover and it's about to be hit again if the rains don't come.
They're getting worse too, a few small towns are gone, as in GONE, nothing left, and the winds are shifting to push the blazes towards some of the larger pretty towns in the Victorian High Country.
It's totally f*cked up. Some snivelling little turds have been lighting these things on purpose. They should be tied to one of the trees in the path of the blaze and left to burn.
EDIT: 76 people now confirmed dead - worse than Ash Wednesday.
Worst Ever Bushfire Disaster.
Ash Wednesday Wiki
Oh man, it's getting much, much worse now...
86 dead, an entire town that was wiped off the map hasn't even been counted because they can't get to it yet.
108 now dead.
Just horrible.
131 now dead, winds are stirring up a potentially massive blaze in the La Trobe valley.
Bloody hell what a nightmare. You can see in one of these photos just how hot the fire was - those trails coming from the car used to be his alloy wheels...
173 dead now... crap. Probably going to exceed 200.
