Comprehensive Analysis of the Devastating Australian Forest Fire

This essay provides an analysis of the Australian forest fire incident, focusing on the events leading up to and during the Black Saturday fires. It details the tropical cyclone that exacerbated existing bushfires, causing chaos at airports and forcing evacuations. The essay also explores the commencement of the Delburn fire and the Bunyip State Park blaze, highlighting the role of fallen power lines and strong winds in intensifying the Kilmore East fire. Forensic investigations were conducted to determine the causes, with arson being a suspected factor. The essay includes key facts about the bushfire, such as the date of occurrence, area burnt, causes including lightning and arson, land use, building destruction, and casualties. The essay concludes with a list of references used in the analysis.

Running head: AUSTRALIAN FOREST FIRE
AUSTRALIAN FOREST FIRE
Name of Student
Name of University
Author’s Note

1AUSTRALIAN FOREST FIRE
Australian forest fire
On the night of a Sunday, a tropical cycle had taken over the coast of north Queensland.
The storm had started to proceed towards the coast, there even more than 100 bushfires had been
burning after the heat waves that continued till a week (Wilson, Cary & Gibbons, 2018). The
strong winds had causes chaos at Melbourne and Sydney airports, which are considered as the
country’s busiest airports. They usually have thousands of travelers standards because runways
had been closed and numerous flights had been cancelled. Winds gushed up to around 70
kilometers every hour and had fanned the bushfires long the coast. The bushfires had forced
people to leave their houses (Price & Gordon, 2016). As a result of the fire, Sydney Airport had
cancelled around 76 flights, but one among the three runways had been closed due to the storm.
The Sydney Airport had informed Reuters that it is not safe for the people to have departing and
landing flights and hence they have switched to one runway, there have been delays (Ondei,
Prior & Williamson, 2017). Melbourne Airport had been reduced the overall number of flights
that were allowed to depart and arrive every hour, this resulted in cancellations in Sydney
Airport. The strong wind had also fanned fires over the state of New South Wales along with
Rural Fire Service which belong to Australia and had reported around 21 fires. A Boeing 737
had modified for the usage in the form of a water bomber which had been used for the purpose of
fighting the bushfires around Newcastle which is situated in the north of Sydney (Sawyer,
Bradstock, & Bedward, 2018). The Rural Fire Service had informed that the decided aircraft has
the capacity to carry around 15,000 liters of fire retardant or water. This had been the very first
operational drop that had taken place and it proved to b e very effective.

2AUSTRALIAN FOREST FIRE
On 28th of January, 2009 the Delburn fire had been commenced in the Central Gippsland
arson was suspected. On 4th February, Wednesday, the Bunyip State Park blaze was commenced.
On 7th February which is also known as the Black Saturday, the Bunyip State Park fire had
jumped into the containment lines; initially no one could detect any other major activity (Kidnie,
Cruz & Matthews, 2016). In the morning, fire sprang up to a very high level and the speed of
wind had increased. Power lines had fallen in the high winds and this ignited the Kilmore East
fire (Shen, Chen & Lewis, 2016). The fire had been fanned by approximately 125 km/h winds
which entered into a pine plantation and grew in its intensity; it then headed towards southeast
through the Wandong area. These sequences of numerous fires had resulted to a huge disaster
(Collins, Price & Penman, 2018). The cops of Australia had designated the area of bush fire as
the crime scene and various forensic officers had conducted the investigation in order to establish
the cause of the outbreak (Rahman, Chang & Magill, 2018). They had also warned the penalties
and declared prison sentences for the accused in case it was proved that the outbreak occurred
due to human interventions.
Some facts regarding the bushfire.
Date of occurrence: 7th of February- 14th of March in the year of 2009
Area burnt: around 450,000 hectares.
Cause of the bushfire: numerous confirmed sources include Lightning, Arson, Machinery
and Power lines.
Land use: rural or urban fringe areas, forest reserves, national parks and farmlands.
Building destroyed: more than 3,500
Fatal injuries caused: 173
Non-fatal injuries caused: 414

3AUSTRALIAN FOREST FIRE

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References
Collins, K. M., Price, O. F., & Penman, T. D. (2018). Suppression resource decisions are the
dominant influence on containment of Australian forest and grass fires. Journal of
environmental management, 228, 373-382.
Kidnie, S. A., Cruz, M. G., Matthews, S., Hurley, R. J., Slijepcevic, A., Nichols, D., & Gould, J.
S. (2016). Evaluating dead fuel moisture models for Australian grasslands. Proceedings
of the International Association of Wildland Fire, Melbourne, Australia, 11-15.
Ondei, S., Prior, L. D., Williamson, G. J., Vigilante, T., & Bowman, D. M. (2017). Water, land,
fire, and forest: Multi‐scale determinants of rainforests in the Australian monsoon
tropics. Ecology and evolution, 7(5), 1592-1604.
Price, O. F., & Gordon, C. E. (2016). The potential for LiDAR technology to map fire fuel
hazard over large areas of Australian forest. Journal of environmental management, 181,
663-673.
Rahman, S., Chang, H. C., Magill, C., Tomkins, K., & Hehir, W. (2018). Forest Fire Occurrence
and Modeling in Southeastern Australia. In Forest Fire. IntechOpen.
Sawyer, R., Bradstock, R., Bedward, M., & Morrison, R. J. (2018). Fire intensity drives post-fire
temporal pattern of soil carbon accumulation in Australian fire-prone forests. Science of
the Total Environment, 610, 1113-1124.
Shen, J. P., Chen, C. R., & Lewis, T. (2016). Long term repeated fire disturbance alters soil
bacterial diversity but not the abundance in an Australian wet sclerophyll forest. Scientific
reports, 6, 19639.

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Wilson, N., Cary, G. J., & Gibbons, P. (2018). Relationships between mature trees and fire fuel
hazard in Australian forest. International journal of wildland fire, 27(5), 353-362.