a few things
One thing that has been bothering me, since I first heard about the fatalities in the bushfires, is why so many seemed to leave it until the last minute to flee. Surely they should have started evacuating as soon as the radio broadcast 'residents of x implement your fire plans now.'
I've used 1 of my days of unemployment to try and uncover how much time people had to implement their fire-plans and unfortunately that info was removed from the cfa website as it became out-dated. What I did discover is that the fire hit Strathewen at 4:20. From what I can gather the cool change had not hit and the fire was still coming from Kilmore, so Kinglake West would have been hit some minutes earlier. What the google cache of the cfa's website does have is the current incident summary at 16:01 that day. It does detail a large fire at Kilmore East (approx 30KM away), but all other fires are listed as small. This page is very unstructured as it's just an extract from their Incident Management system and is only useful if you have time to study it and know every town in the vicinity. In order to make sense of it I've plotted it on a google map. It's clear that Wandong had already been hit by then, but not so clear that Kinglake was minutes away from the inferno. It's mentioned 3 times (one of which a false alarm). 2 hours later Kinglake has 29 mentions.
I also find it bizarre that the fire is listed as multiple small fires in the same area (even 2 hours later when it has spread through Kinglake). I know that Kilmore East was listed as a Large fire, but it seems like it did not affect Kilmore East much. Medium is only used once in the entire page. The Murrindindi Mill fire that ended up wiping out Marysville is only listed as 2 small grass fires.
After I did all this research I then came across the best article written about it, which explains that Kinglake and St Andrews had already been wiped out before they were mentioned in the radio updates of towns in danger. My god... I mean my god!
I've used 1 of my days of unemployment to try and uncover how much time people had to implement their fire-plans and unfortunately that info was removed from the cfa website as it became out-dated. What I did discover is that the fire hit Strathewen at 4:20. From what I can gather the cool change had not hit and the fire was still coming from Kilmore, so Kinglake West would have been hit some minutes earlier. What the google cache of the cfa's website does have is the current incident summary at 16:01 that day. It does detail a large fire at Kilmore East (approx 30KM away), but all other fires are listed as small. This page is very unstructured as it's just an extract from their Incident Management system and is only useful if you have time to study it and know every town in the vicinity. In order to make sense of it I've plotted it on a google map. It's clear that Wandong had already been hit by then, but not so clear that Kinglake was minutes away from the inferno. It's mentioned 3 times (one of which a false alarm). 2 hours later Kinglake has 29 mentions.
I also find it bizarre that the fire is listed as multiple small fires in the same area (even 2 hours later when it has spread through Kinglake). I know that Kilmore East was listed as a Large fire, but it seems like it did not affect Kilmore East much. Medium is only used once in the entire page. The Murrindindi Mill fire that ended up wiping out Marysville is only listed as 2 small grass fires.
After I did all this research I then came across the best article written about it, which explains that Kinglake and St Andrews had already been wiped out before they were mentioned in the radio updates of towns in danger. My god... I mean my god!