The Black Saturday Bushfires of 2009 | Episode 104

There is a strong anthropological argument that controlled fire was humanity's first invention. Among the many gifts it bestows upon us, being able to survive colder climates is one of them. But as you will soon see in today's episode, that will not be an issue. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll hear about one of the deadliest and most destructive forces on the planet that can actually play a kind of peekaboo and then grow three hundred feet tall and then make you foul yourself. You will learn what the actual deadliest animals in Australia are and number one will surprise you. And you will learn how one species of tree evolved in a way that makes it want to die as dramatically as possible. And if you were listening on Patreon, you would hear the story of how living dinosaurs defeated one of the world's most experienced and battle hardened armies. You would have a chance to meet the tallest and least flammable living thing on Earth, and you would learn why arsonists are the stupidest, most selfish, and potentially even racist people you may ever meet, and how to disable one if you ever do. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company, But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. In nineteen seventy three, America launched its first space station, Skylab. It was supposed to be called the Apollo Application Program Orbital Workshop, but they decided to let the public take a swing at naming it, and although for reasons the majority wanted spacey mixedtation face, they christened it Skylab. It was actually built out of a Saturn five rocket stage, the same way you might convert a van into a mobile apartment. It was an orbital laboratory, like the name suggests, designed as a place for humanity to study the Sun and observe the Earth and discover what laws duration spaceflight does to the human body. Long duration said in quotes, saw the first crew arrive in May of nineteen seventy three and the last crew leave in February of the next year. Humanity use Skylab for less than six months, then left it drifting helplessly without propulsion or control, circling the Earth for the better part of five years, and by nineteen seventy nine, atmospheric drag threatened to pull all seventy seven tons of it back home, and that news made people go crazy. There were Skylab disco parties, and people wore helmets and hard hats or hid out in caves, and people sold everything from T shirts to cans of Skylab repellent to take advantage of the whole thing. Newspapers printed crazy projection maps about where it might land, while governments issued equally vague warnings about what to do if you found yourself playing catch with any other. NASA set the vegas odds of you getting lawn darted by this thing at one in one hundred and fifty two. But the truth was no one was sure where on Earth it would land, not even the marketing department at Doctor Pepper. And that is why they said if a piece of Skylab landed on your home. A delivery truck was going to be fighting all of the news vans and fire trucks full of free doctor pepper, sadly for doctor pepper drinkers. On July the eleventh, nineteen seventy nine, Skylab started to fall apart over the Indian Ocean on its way to Australia. The bulk of it landed near the remote town of Esperance in western Australia. And how remote are we talking about. Well, the nearest neighbor is Perth, and that was about seven hundred and twenty kilometers or four hundred and fifty miles away. There are plenty of places without a postcard guard in Australia, places with no crowds or seabirds or lifeguard stations, just wide open views of an unbroken horizon and, in Esperance's case, lightly radioactive pieces of twisted metal. Over the years, Australia has quietly become one of the world's favorite toilets for space debris. And I don't bring it up to suggest that Australia deserves our garbage or our contempt. Far from it. But I do bring it up to suggest that fascinating and consequential things happen there, and the world pays very little attention. A rocket could bounce off Air's rock and the outside world would barely take notice, although they did have a polite chuckle when the town issued Nasa a fine for littering. When most people think of Australia, they think of insects and snakes and sharks and deans and kangaroos and spiders and jellyfish and crocodiles and dinosaur birds and all of the other things that want to pluck out your eyes or sting you to death, because Australia clearly wants you dead. But ironically, we actually have a very poor understanding about what's really likely permanently to avoid your health insurance. This will surprise you, but the one animal most likely to kill you statistically is the horse. About one third of all animal related deaths in Australia are delivered on horseback or under horse hoof. I should say you are roughly five to six times more likely to be killed by a horse than a shark, and thousands of times more likely than by a spider. I hate to put your mind at ease like this, but there hasn't been a confirmed death from a spider bite in Australia since nineteen seventy nine. Even if you ran into a box jellyfish, or a blue ringed octopus or a saltwater crocodile, the danger would be extensive but overwhelmingly rare. A kangaroo drop kicking your skull off through your windshield is far more dangerous by the numbers. And of all the animals that actively initiate conflict, the most aggressive may be the simple Australian magpie. If you don't know, that is a bird that is closely related to crows, and they are as territorial as hell. They attack more people in a year than sharks, crocs and snakes combined do in a decade. And of course the people of Australia would definitely want me to warn you about drop bears. Picture a toothier, carnivorous relative of the koala that lives in eucalyptus trees and drops onto unsuspecting people attacking the head. And now, if you ever have the opportunity to visit down Under, when you get there, just ask anyone you see about them and they will tell you everything that you need to know. If you really wanted to scare someone about Australia, you wouldn't start with the fact that the birds could slice you in half with their dinosaur claws, or the venomous creatures that carry enough toxic potential to wipe out your entire tour group with a single nip n. I think that you should start by describing the sheer, scale and hostility of the place. Take the entire continental United States. Now remove most of the rivers, most of the mountains, and the rain and any hint of shade, and you are only barely starting to understand how dry and inhospitable Australia can be. The first people, the original Aboriginal Australians, set up shop on the continent at least sixty five thousand years ago. First documented European to touch Australian soil was Dutch navigator Willem jen Zun, who landed on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula in sixteen oh six, but he was all ooh hot, hot, too hot, and left. In seventeen seventy, British explorer Captain James Cook charted the east coast aboard the Endeavor and landed near modern day Sydney at Botany Bay, but he was all hot, hot, hot, and left two. In seventeen eighty eight, Captain Arthur Philip led the first fleet of European colonists and they began to complain about the heat until Captain Philip detonated their ship, blowing it into a million pieces, and proclaimed, I don't want to hear it. You ain't never going back. Every school child across Australia knows that speech, and every January twenty sixth they recite and reenact this foundational event as part of their Australia Day commemorations. It is a big and sunburned country and we are going to spend our time in the lower right hand corner in the state of Victoria. Victoria may be small compared to the other states, but it is absurdly dense in culture and scenery. You've ever been to a place where you could surf a wave, then visit a rainforest, then get hammered at a world class winery, and be passed out back at your hotel room by eight pm. The capital is Melbourne, and we've actually been there before during our Melbourne Armageddon disaster of nineteen ninety two. Episode. They had a little thing called a gold rush that made them filthy rich, and in eighteen sixty they funded the most lavish inland expedition of the continent ever seen. But lavish and combetant are not the same thing. Two men named Bobby Burke and Billy Wills led the expedition to cross Australia from the south to the north, but crossing the continent and surviving it are also not the same thing. The idea of crossing the continent may have started in the name of discovery, but it quickly devolved into a race for personal fame and bragging rights. Robert O'Hara Burke was the appointed leader despite having no bush or desert or surveying experience, and William John Wills was appointed as the expedition's science officer. Imagine dozens of horses and camels and wagons loaded down with credenzas and other heavy ass furniture and food that required refrigeration. They literally did everything wrong, but they did manage to reach a mangrove swamp near the northern coast in February of eighteen sixty one. On the way back, though they suffered every kind of injury and privation possible, ignored the advice of Aboriginals that tried to help them and then died within literal walking distance of food and water. Australia's interior does not reward gumption, it rewards wisdom, and over the years Aboriginal trackers have found many Europeans dead beside water sources or near edible plants, sometimes with food in their hands. But they all die because they didn't know what they were doing. They were moving through central Australia in summer, and in much of inland Australia, forty to forty five degrees celsius or one hundred and four to one hundred and thirteen fahrenheit isn't rare. There was no real shade and no way to recover from the heat, even at night. Under those conditions, even the most basic exertion like complaining or waving away flies could be dangerous. It is so hot that rivers and lakes can vanish into sand, and when it does rain, it can just come all at once, followed by nothing for months or years. So why is it like that? Well, most people don't think of Australia as having mountains, but they are a thing, and Australia's main mountain chain is called the Great Dividing Range. The tallest part of the chain is only seventy three hundred feet. However, they are the third longest chain in the world at about thirty five hundred kilometers or twenty one hundred and seventy five miles from tip to butthole. It runs along the eastern coast. So the problem is when moist air blows in from the ocean, it kind of hits a wall, and that range forces all of that air upwards, where it cools and then pours down his rain, meaning that the interior of the country gets squat It is the reason people call Australia an oven you can't step out of. Early explorers called it a sun blasted wilderness that seared the lungs with every breath. It's the kind of landscape that doesn't kill you. It doesn't even have to. It's already killed everything that makes survival possible, if that makes sense. In spite of its long punishing tradition of doling out hardship, in the nineteen nineties, the country proved that it could still find new ways to inflict pain by rediscovering just how dry dry could become, even by Australian standards. This all began around nineteen ninety one when rainfall across eastern Australia began to dry up, and this continued through the late two thousands, and as droughts go, this was one of the longest and most severe ever recorded since Whitey first arrived. Across the states of New South Wales and Queensland and Victoria and Southuster, agriculture dried up and blew away. Soils were chronically moisture depleted, which caused trees and plants to shed their branches and leaves to prolong their existence. Dams and creeks ran dry, and moisture levels fell to the point where anything you picked up off the ground felt just like kiln dried timber. And I'm not just saying that. They literally tested it. Fire agencies and the Bureau of Meteorology said that the moisture levels had dropped to a point never before seen. And here's the thing. You ever watched someone try to start a fire from scratch, literally scraping sticks together endlessly until a single spark is fostered and brought to life with the most gentle cajoling and blowing and supplying fuel and air and prayer. It is quite possibly the most aggravating thing a person can try to do well. By two thousand and nine, Australians could start a fire by tapping two sticks together. Ten years of drought will do that. It all became known as the Millennium Drought. Imagine a whole generation of children under ten asking what is rain, Papa. I think you can see where this is headed. Our story today begins Saturday, February the seventh, two thousand and nine. In the weeks leading up to February, Victoria experienced one of the most severe heat waves ever recorded. Temperature sword humidity collapsed and Melbourne endured three days above forty three degrees that's about one hundred and nine fahrenheit, and the temperature peaked at forty four point four degrees celsius or one hundred and fifteen point five fahrenheit, and Hopetne reached forty eight point eight celsius or one hundred and nineteen point eight fahrenheit, taking a step back real quick. On February sixth, a pop warning was issued that the next day was expected to be the worst day in the history of the state. Of course, not everyone got that message. Many residents found themselves ill prepared, and some would not survive. By late morning on February seven, the extreme heat morning became something else. Entirely powerful northerly winds well over one hundred kilometers or sixty miles per hour swept down from Australia's interior like a storm, hot, dry and fast, and just before noon, those extreme winds knocked down power lines near Saunders Road, near a town called Kilmore East. This is most often thought of as the true beginning of what I assure you will be a very busy day. Those fallen power lines produced sparks that ignited dry grasses and vegetation, and the term used to describe its growth was explosive. Fire spread southeast and within hours it grew and grew and grew into an unstoppable wall of flames, racing towards populated areas, crossing the Hume Freeway near Wandong around two PM, with the winds pushing flames at unprecedented speed. In just the first two hours of this fire, thirty kilometers or eighteen miles of land were already completely engulfed in flames. It burned through Wandong and Mount Disappointment, racing southeast through forest and farmland, directly towards King Lake and Stretheuan and Hume Vale and Saint Andrew's. Any and all debris or embers and burning bark was suck high into the air and blown forward where it started fires as far as forty kilometers or twenty five miles down wind. This thing was moving so fast that it was destroying power and community cation lines, and between its speed and the amount of smoke coming out of it, it was extremely difficult to really understand the fire size and movement. People were overwhelmed by its speed, and by the time they realized they had to escape, many found themselves in zero visibility from the smoke, with trees and debris and fire blocking their paths. Roads in this area were narrow and winding, with dense forests on both sides, and people found themselves surrounded by fire before they faced the general problem of vehicles dying in the heat as their parts melted. Many were forced to try and shelter in their homes, but the conditions were so intense windows shattered and interiors ignited from the heat. Alone, there is a long standing tradition in Australia where people stayed to defend their properties, but the water systems failed when the power went out, so they were completely open overwhelmed. There were no end of smoke injuries, but the fire was so large and so intense and put out so much heat that the heat alone was hot enough to burn and kill without even making contact. And it wasn't just one fire to begin. Multiple fires had started across Victoria, all on the same day. At least five had been sparked by falling power lines, but others had been caused from everything from lightning to suspected arson. And our fire later merged with another fire called the Murrdindi millfire and voltrond into the massive Kinglake fire complex, and this became a massive firestorm that only grew as multiple major fires joined up northeast of Melbourne. At this point, witnesses were describing the glow of bright orange flame that was as much as two hundred feet or sixty meters tall. You can't even imagine the viceral horror of watching danger on that scale and feeling the strong inflow of wind as the fire sucks in all the surrounding oxygen trying to pull you in with it. Entire tree canopies ignited instantly, and the sound had become enormous, like a blast furnace. And they call that a crown fire, when the whole top of an entire forest goes whoosh. At the same time, the heat arrived well before any flames did. Like we said, it dried skin and it made breathing feel hot and abrasive. And here is the thing about Australian forests, even they want you dead. See, much of Victoria's forestry is dominated by eucalyptus trees, and most people just call them gum trees because they have a very sticky sap, and that sap contains volatile oils with a very low ignition temperature that ignite explosively. And you say, well for a tree, that doesn't sound very good at all, and it's actually worse. See, in heat, these oils vaporize, and the cumulative vapor from thousands of trees can make the surrounding atmosphere behave like a fuel cloud. And somehow even worse. Eucalyptus trees have a kind of stringy bark that it sheds, and this becomes even more fuel on the forest floor, and in these more harrowing moments, tens of thousands of these strips of bark float away, lifted by the heat, ignite in mid air, and then seed new fires like a contagion, faster than anyone could comprehend. I've heard people call them arson bushes or petrol trees, which I could get behind. And the worst part is they like it. They adapt it this way because fire clears out their competition, and ash fertilizes soil, and the heat opens up their seed pods. It's crazy, but fire has been a part of the Australian experience since plant life first took root, probably for the last three hundred million years or so, and as a result, a lot of vegetation evolved to take advantage of it and actually require intense heat to germinate. By now, the fire had reached as much as twelve hundred degrees celsius or twenty two hundred degrees fahrenheit, and as it intensified, people described the sound of the inferno like the roar of multiple jet engines fighting to be heard over each other. About four hundred individual fires were recorded across Victoria, and of those about a dozen had become major fires, including the Churchill Fire, the Bunyip State Park fire, the Beachworth Muchagonga fire, and the Horsham fire. That is not a comprehensive list, and I bring it up just to remind you. Any one of these fires alone have been a disaster. People found themselves trapped in their own driveways by fallen trees and an absolute blizzard of flaming embers was blowing horizontally. Others would race out of their neighborhood, find themselves blocked by two hundred feet of flame, spin around a flea, and find that their neighborhood was already on fire all around them. People found themselves in a maelstrom of darkness and fireballs and fire tornadoes of all things. People described it like being in a washing machine full of fire and embers sent to the spin cycle. So they would just drive through the flames as fast as they could, just hoping for the best. On the other side. They simply had no other choice. Even more desperate people headed to the nearest body of water, just hoping that the freshwater crocodiles would make some space. And at this point, and this is incredible, experts described this catastrophe as unprecedented and functioning at the edge of what was physically possible for a bushfire. Emergency services were stretched thin across the entire state, and then late in the day there was a sudden wind shift that turned the flank of the fire into a brand new front, which trapped people who believed that the fire had already safely passed over them. So you're listening to a podcast about wildfire and you're thinking, well, this is awful, I mean, the topic, not the show. And you look over and you see a glow outside your window bearing down on you, like the demonstration of the Genesis device from Star Trek two. Would you know what to do hiding from fire? Huh? Not the best scenario, but at least you are smart enough to not try to hug it or anything. So let's see what we can do to improve your chances for a safe, if not disturbing time during your next wildfire encounter. The most likely scenario sees you at home during a wildfire, So first things first, if an authority says to leave, just do it and quickly. Most fatalities occur because people ended up waiting too long. But if that were to happen, you've got to shelter in place. So Step one should be preparing your environment. Close all your windows, your doors, your vents, your fireplace, dampener any pet doors, whatever it is you've got, and pull your curtains or anything flammable away from your windows. You're also gonna want to plug up your sinks and bathtubs and find any containers you've got and fill them with water. It's good stuff to have, and you can douse yourself in it to stay cool, or even use it to squash any hotspots that appear after the fire has come and gone, but mostly just to be able to keep drinking water after the pumps that power your local water infrastructure go dead. It's also good for cooling burns, wetting your clothes and keeping you from generally dehydrating in the heat, and for soaking towels for breathing protection. Wet cloth over your nose and mouth can reduce the smoke particulates you're breathing. It's not perfect, but it is so much better than nothing. Turning off your gas certainly isn't going to hurt, and if you're going to be waiting it out, you are going to want to hide in the room furthest from the direction of the approaching fire, and in the basement if you have one, and of course stay low below any smoke. And here's something people don't consider. You should try to leave as many lights on as you can before the power cuts out. Of course, it would help give you better potential visibility if your house filled up with smoke. And if you're prepared, you'll already have a flashlight and radio and a phone with you, and you will be wearing fully detective clothing, not shorts or t shirts or anything that exposes skin, and preferably anything nonsynthetic that won't melt onto you. Now, for the outside of your house, you're gonna want to keep any hoses connected and charged up, and a lot of people like to wet down their roofs or the surrounding vegetation if embers start falling. But I have to say this only if it is absolutely safe to do so. I won't be there to tell you to go inside, so you are going to be left to your own judgment, which should be based on how hot is it, how hard is it to breathe, and is your gut telling you that it is time to just give up. If you found yourself in a car, the best thing you can do is vamoose with your vents and windows closed. Of course, if escape is not possible, I'm gonna tell you to keep your eyes peeled for a parking lot or an empty field. What I'm gonna want you to do is to try to pull over into the clearest area that you can find wherever it is that's furthest away from buildings or trees or anything that looks flammable. Basically, you're going to have to be creative. After that, you'll have to turn the car off and then cover yourself with as much protection as you can find, blankets, clothes, whatever, and stay below the window level. And it can be hard to appreciate the little things that you have in life. And in this situation, you may feel like you've just locked yourself into an oven, but it is worse outside. And let's say that you are trapped outside when this happens. You want to find an area with the least amount of fuel, like bare ground or a recently burned area. If you're lucky, that's a good one. And at worst, you want to lay face down in some kind of cleared area, and then you know what. Honestly, and this will sound weird, but if it is possible, try to cover yourself with soil or sand or anything non flammable and then just stay put, protect your air way and always remember that heat rises. And if you found yourself near water, well, just be prepared to kiss any electronics you're carrying goodbye and get the hell in it. Respecting your obvious need to breathe, try to stay submerged as much as you can. And for those of you who live in fire prone areas and you're not currently being threatened as you're listening to this, I want you to deeply consider turning what I am about to tell you into a habit. Try to keep as much mulch or dead plants or firewood away from your house, keep your gutters and ease clear, and remove any tree branches that are growing too close to your roof, and keep the lawn mode. In fact, I'll do you one better. For whatever percentage of the audience who's currently remodeling in these areas, you should seriously consider fire resistant shingles for the roof and ceiling off any gaps where embers could enter. Things like get mesh covered, vent covers, dual pained or tempered glass windows resist heat better. And even in my neighborhood, where there is an insanely low risk of anything like this ever happening, there are properties that have sprinklers built into the ground and on their roofs. In a perfect world, you've already got your go bag with everything you could possibly need, and a map or battery powered GPS with multiple evacuation roots already pre planned out. Actually, in a perfect world, this never happens, and you stay safe and happy, and we all laugh about it on Patreon together. By the evening, the firestorm had already traveled over seventy kilometers or forty three miles. Firefighting aircraft couldn't possibly cover the kind of space that we are now talking about. Communications were overloaded or non existent. Imagine. All told, almost twenty four thousand people were working this problem in different capacities. And you make a call to the emergency services because your garden just wooshed into flames, and every single fire crew from your state and abroad are already busy trying to extinguish something somewhere else. The human brain is not designed to be able to even grasp the size of something this large. Imagine a fire that you could see from New Zealand just try to imagine anything big enough to make smoke visible from space. In some areas, these fires generated pyro cumulus clouds, and you're all, wooh clouds. Well, you ever see a cloud that looks like it's boiling hot air rises and condenses into clouds above the smoke column that could reach all the way into the upper atmosphere and produces lightning that starts new fires for miles in every direction. They also create unpredictable winds that changed direction with no warning. And have you ever seen a cloud that can fart out a tornado? Also made of fire? Longtime listeners, well, remember that we actually talked about this insane phenomenon back in our San Luis Obispo episode. These are the clouds that firefighters describe as the things that turn fires into storm systems the next day. By the morning of January eighth, the story was finally over, except that it wasn't, and fires still raged completely uncontrolled across the entire state. Emergency crews found themselves blocked off by destroyed roads and fallen trees, so helicopters had to take over the search. Injured survivors were flown to hospitals. And I do not say this lightly, but at this point no one has any idea just how bad this was going to get. And Australia as a nation was already begin to mourn, even though this was far from over. We were one day in. I mean, how long could this possibly last? Over the next few days, fires continued their awful work, while more and more injured and more than injured if you follow my meaning, were found and removed. And during this time, the winds would drive fires in one direction for hours and hours, and then just violently suddenly changed direction and overrun an evacuation route and sometimes even previously burned homes and things continued this way for weeks until mercifully cooler temperatures and humidity began to return, and fire crews were able to build containment lines and finally start to rain things in. Most major fires were finally contained by late February eight. The communities were at least partially destroyed. Towns like Kinglake and Marysville and Strathuin and Flowerdale had been almost completely erased. Brick structures were gutted and wooden homes vanished entirely, leaving only smoky outlines where they had once stood. All that remained were concrete slabs and chimneys and twisted metal. Imagine coming back home and finding your oven and dryer melted together. About four hundred and fifty thousand hectares had burned. That's about forty five hundred square kilometers or seventeen hundred and forty square miles. That is enough space to park about three hundred and sixty seven million Dodge caravans. The Black Saturday Fires continued to burn from February seventh to March the fourteenth, so about five weeks or thirty six days. Along with the homes and buildings and infrastructure and wildlife and forests and farms and schools and communications and museums and businesses and roads and bridges and heritage sites and utilities and national parks and war memorials and entire communities that were destroyed, four hundred and fourteen people were injured, more than a million wild and domesticated animals were lost, and one hundred and seventy three people had died. So what happened well? National Memorial Services were held. Financial assistant programs were created, along with temporary housing for the homeless and plans for reconstruction. And while this was all going on, investigations into the causes and effects were already well underway. The Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission was the most comprehensive inquiry of its kind in the country's history. The commission concluded that the power lines were dropped because of the winds and tree branches and their age and lack of maintenance, and there was a possibility that they had just been installed wrong. Either way, years of use led to metal fatigue, which weakened them, and when they snapped, electrical arcs of superheated plasma ignited whatever they touched. From there, existing fire detection and warning systems did what they could, but they were designed to play checkers, while this fire was playing for d chess. The fire arrived in towns faster than the warnings could be issued, and this was a huge part of the problem delayed warnings. In one situation, the agent in charge of issuing a warning to the public about the Kilgore fire took four hours to get to the incident control center. Residents sat nervously refreshing the web page over and over and over, but it took a few hours for anyone to update the website, and by then it was too late. Strithewen got there first warning after the fire had already ravaged the town and killed twenty seven. A lot of fingers were pointed and a lot of hands were waved in the aftermath. The county Fire authority went so far as to say they hadn't actually been under any kind of obligation to warn people about fire, and then turned around and blamed the victim, saying that they did have a warning, you know, in the form of the smoke in the sky, but in a lot of cases said that there was little evidence that a fire was approaching until it was almost on top of them, so way to go. And second, by all accounts, the fire was already impossible to control only fifteen minutes after it started. The commission found that the victims hadn't done anything wrong or irrational. It was just that the fire grew and evolve faster than they could adapt or get out of its way. There is wrong place, wrong time, and then there's whatever this was. Southeastern Australia had been gripped by a decade of drought since the late nineteen nineties, and by two thousand and nine, most of Victoria's forests and grasslands had become historically flammable, which is a really weird thing to say, historically flammable. The more things that died, the more fuel became available, and between that and the eucalyptus's boner for fire, what happened became unstoppable. The icing on the cake was a powerful cold front in the Southwest that pulled all that ridiculously hot, dry, northerly air downwards at hurricane speeds. Imagine a place where the forests evolved to burn and some of the plants actually require fire to reproduce, and the local fauna can burn faster than you can run from the ground level. It's like it simply appears everywhere, all at once, and these fires were no fluke. It took years for all the conditions to line up just right. Small controlled burns have always been the best way to reduce the fuel load of dead leaves and branches and grasses to lessen the intensity of the next fire before it builds up to a point where no amount of tears could possibly extinguish it, and Aboriginal peoples had been using it as a land management tool for tens of thousands of years. They used to burn off bush and grass, and the ash made the land healthier, and it kept trails clear and to promote new growth that would attract food. And they even used it strategically, sometimes making a small grass fire to corral animals towards waiting hunters. But as the Aboriginal people were driven off the land, their knowledge of low intensity fire management went with them, and they have been watching as Whitey watches helplessly as everything they build burns down ever since. There are hundreds of Aboriginal languages is in Australia, and although I don't have an available translation for I told you so, I am told that, they are way more likely to just give you a smug and knowing look. They saw fire as a tool, while Europeans only saw it as a threat. Leading up to two thousand and nine, a lot of people spent a lot of time talking and not actually doing things like burn bands, which they wouldn't do because of the drought and because of public concerns about completely smoking out Urban areas like Melbourne. Really helped sabotage everything. And because of this and so much more, the Black Saturday disaster has become a case study in compound disaster risk around the world. A decade long drought plus dry oil rich forests plus record breaking heat plus severe wind, plus various ignition sources plus human settlements right in the crosshairs, plus the limited state of human firefighting technology, and all of this destruction was unavoidable. And as the Commission put it, fires like these were quote unsurvivable regardless of human action. Now, there had been a stay or go policy that was introduced in the nineties as a cost cutting measure by the government. It was a kind of way of saying, hey, how about instead of us figuring out the evacuation in firefighting needed to protect you, how about you just stay home and fight your own fire. Well, after this, that just wasn't a thing anymore. Other lessons learned include the idea that past fire experience was no longer a reliable predictor of the future, and that sometimes you just have to concede defeat and get out of the way. Between the loss of life, the injury to family and friends, the loss of homes, and all the memories they contained. It was hard enough to bear, but the realization that this could happen again was more than some people could take. Many never returned to their homes. The Commission alleged that almost half of the fires were caused by electricity distribution company s p Osnet and Power Corps, which took over the services when the government privatized the service, and then they dropped the ball on maintaining everything. One of the world's largest class action lawsuits at the time was brought on by survivors, which resulted in electricity companies paying out four hundred and ninety four million dollars in relation to the King Lake fire and a three hundred million dollar out of court settlement in relation to the Marysville fire. This was definitely the biggest payout in Australian history. The government also ponied up another thirty million, and together with the Red Cross, they raised almost three hundred and eighty million dollars. The damages were estimated at just over a billion dollars. Policy planning and emergency management systems were substantially rewritten to include stricter building codes in bushfire prone areas, including hey, how about in certain areas we just don't rebuild. A mobile alert system was created along with a brand new Code RED classification for catastrophic fire warnings. Black Saturday is remembered by Australians the way other countries remember wars or major tragedies. Speaking of imagine surviving something this harrowing, seeing how it can change an entire country, sitting back and comforting yourself with the lessons learned, and then it happens again. Before I introduce you to the Black Summer Fires of twenty nineteen to twenty twenty, I have to remind you Australia love's fire, the country, not the people. Before the fire, we already discussed history was made by the Black Thursday Fire of eighteen fifty one, the Red Tuesday Fire of eighteen ninety eight, the Black Sunday Fire of a eighteen twenty six, the Black Friday Fire of nineteen thirty nine, the Black Tuesday Fire of nineteen sixty seven, and the Ash Wednesday Fire of nineteen eighty three. And when I start selling my thank God it's almost Monday again, mugs, I think that they will sell well in Australia because Monday seems to be the safest day of the week there, the Black Summer Fires became one of the largest and most destructive wildfire seasons ever recorded, and not just in Australia but globally. They burned across multiple states from September of twenty nineteen until March of the following year. Blood red skies turned daylight into night and sent entire coastal towns sheltering onto beaches as fire closed. In compared to Black Saturday, Black Summer was about forty to fifty times bigger. I said the previous disaster destroyed about four hundred and fifty thousand hectares un destroyed closer to twenty million hectares across the states of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia. That is about enough space for nineteen point five seven billion with a b Dodge caravans. And the causes were the same extreme drought plus heat plus wind plus fuel build up and then just added a little lightning and accidents and maybe a little arson. The smoke from the Black Summer fires traveled into the stratosphere and around the globe. It enveloped areas that rarely experienced wildfire, and this led to massive deforestation and billions of animals lost. Over three thousand homes were destroyed and with entire communities cut off from escape by land, places like Malakuda became the sites of some of the largest sea evacuations in Australian history. Imagine being trapped on a beach under a blood red sky praying for a boat. Most people will never know what it feels like to pray for a boat. These fires led to the deaths of thirty three people, with maybe another four hundred dying later from complications from smoke inhalation. The Black Saturday catastrophe was contained to one state, that's Victoria, and it showed just how deadly fire could be. But Black Summer became a nationwide disaster that became a global issue, you know, stinkwise, and that showed just how big fire could get. More homes were destroyed during the Black Summer event. But Black Summer wasn't one big ass fire, hungry hungry hippoing it through postal codes. The homes lost during the Black Summer fires were lost across multiple states and over the course of months. Black Saturday represented the greatest destruction of homes in a single bush fire event. This is not a perfect analogy, but it is the difference between someone setting random fires across your country and someone specifically targeting your home state with a laser from space. Contrary to the government's claims that Black Saturday was a freak event, long term weather experts agree that incredibly destructive firestorms are only going to become more common over time. Those living in fire prone areas are still going to be left to fend for themselves a because implementing safer housing and fire response and an efficient evacuation system is expensive and b disasters will not wait for your government, and neither should you. Waiting for rescue is not a strategy. In every disaster, there is a moment where people realize that help is not coming, and the survivors are the ones who plan accordingly. The Black Saturday bushfires of two thousand and nine remain the deadliest bushfire disaster in Australian history, and behind only the Black Dragon fire that crossed the China USS border in nineteen eighty seven and the Peshtigo fire that raised across Wisconsin in eighteen seventy one. The Black Saturday bushfires of two thousand and nine are remembered as the deadliest wildfire in the last forty years and the third deadliest wildfire in all of recorded human history. I wasn't lying when I said I had a soft spot in my heart for Australia. In an alternate timeline, you are listening to this podcast, and I have a slightly adopted Australian accent because that is where I happily live today. Australians make up a big chunk of my listenership, and I'm just to send more love your way. I was speaking with a few of you about exactly how to do that, and step one was to get another episode under our belt. And I'll tell you a quick story that in discussion with my kids around the idea of greeting people from other cultures using their own accents, they went back and forth and back and forth and decided that good Day was kind of inappropriate for me, And after no small amount of discussion, came to the consensus that I could say hello and that that wouldn't be upsetting to anyone. So Hello. I remember the Black Saturday fires when they happened, and watching the scenes of this crazy, unimaginable horror just sweeping across the land and thought, now that I'm older and do this show a, let's try to shed even a little bit of light onto what makes Australia so damn fascinating and be also to pay off people's fears about the place with a whole new fear that they hadn't even considered. Imagine I did a travel PSA for Texas, Hey Texas that just said Texas can get hot in the summer, and sometimes the air will catch fire around you and turn you into a roast marshmallow. I would sound insane, and maybe you would think that I just started making stuff up, but only because you didn't know any better. And well not this time. And in spite of all the biting and kicking and venom and fire and hooves and claws and the laundry list of things that will go out of their way to make you stop taking pictures and breaths, I still would love to visit one day. I'd love to come for Australia Day to watch them blow up the boats in the harbor and recite those famously threatening and foundational words. And yeah, it seems like an impossible dream, but never say never to dreams. And if I never get to actually meet my Australian listeners. Just know that I wish that I could. And later, when tourists arrive asking about drop airs, just be gentle with them. Off top. There is a scene in the nineteen eighty seven holiday Classic Planes, Trains and Automobiles where John Candy and Steve Martin's car burns down and then they try to rent a hotel room, but their credit cards have been reduced to blackened, melted kind of a plastic jerky. And if you didn't spend the last month or so watching everything you own incinerate, and your wallet still smells more like leather than charcoal, and you enjoy today's show, why not consider becoming a supporter over at patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo add free episodes, extra content, behind the scenes, stuff, safety, stuff, me, you name it. I always say this, but donations from people like you are the reason that I've been able to do this show as often as I have. The majority of Patreon supporters just sign up to make a small monthly donation and help sustain the show. And then they just do a runner or go walk about and just bugger off. And that's okay. Support is support in all its mariad forms, and I appreciate all of you for it. And if you're all, yeah, nah, I'm right, sounds like hard yaka, Well you could always just visit, buy me a coffee dot com slash doomsday and show your support with a one time donation. And now I would like to offer my most sincere, heartfelt shout out to Eric Savitski, who I think I called out last time and can't remember but simply don't care. Thanks Eric, and not just Eric, Danielle, Rapella Jones, Bogo Bag, Regina Stewart and Alan for helping support the show and everyone, as always is free to reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast or just fire an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. And on that note, Angel. Hello, Jake reached out to me and he really wanted to impress upon me how much he loves and cares about you and want wanted me to wish you a very happy two year anniversary, which and if the stars. Aligned, this will not be a belated announcement, but in the off chance that it was, the sentiment still holds true. Angel and Jake happiest of anniversaries to you both. Here is two at least two more and never appearing on this show. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review, and honestly, more importantly, if you can tell your friends, share a post, do whatever. That really helps grow the listenership and it is incredibly appreciated. I always want to thank every supporter I have ever had, new and old, for their support and especially their encouragement. However, if you can spare the money and had to choose, I always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmtic dot Ca. On the next episode, when you look to the night skies, it's hard to really grasp the unimaginable voids of space between the stars. That's why I find it so incredibly fascinating that of all the quadrillions of stars out there, we have our very own star, literally just right there. We have no good practical way to visit the thing. And in the next episode you will see how sometimes it maybe seems to get a little lonely and just wants to reach out and come visit us for a while. It's the Carrington geomagnetic superstorm of eighteen fifty nine. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.