Phys.org - May 28, 2012 By Martyn Pearce
The devastation of Black Saturday bushfires gave researchers an unparalleled opportunity to come up with bushfire answers.
The numbers that belong to Black Saturday are extraordinary, and horribly sobering. 173 people killed, more than 400 injured – many seriously. More than 2,000 homes lost, 400 individual fires, 78 towns affected, more than 7,000 people displaced.
The unprecedented and severe fires began on a day where temperatures were in the mid-40s and were fanned by wind gusts reaching 90km an hour. They left a scar on the landscape of more than one million acres of the country.
But hidden within the numbers and the sheer horror of the day’s events, is hope. Hope for answers. Because while the scale of the fires was unprecedented, they also provided an unprecedented opportunity for quality research.
Some of that research has been conducted by a team of 10 scientists, including Dr Phil Gibbons and Dr Geoff Cary from the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU.
The research team looked at 12,000 measurements from 500 houses affected by the Black Saturday fires. It was a sample size which had never been achieved before in bushfire research.
“More than any other major wildfire in Australia, Black Saturday provided an unprecedented opportunity to learn about the effects of land management on house loss,” says Gibbons.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, what they found suggested there was no simple
solution. But they did find that one solution helped more than most.
“Clearing trees and shrubs within 40 metres of houses was the most effective form of fuel reduction,” says Gibbons. - Read the full Phys.org article.
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