11 December 2006
The sky went dark
Posted by Mick (SplaTT) Stanic under: Personal; Upper Yarra Valley .
Two of the joys of having a property in the Upper Yarra Valley (in Victoria Australia) is the view of the mountains during the day and the amount of stars you can see at night…both of which disappeared last weekend on the 9th and 10th and of December 2006.
Bush fires have been burning for over a week now about 40-50km as the crow flys north-north-east of the “country residence” in the Victorian Alpine area and the amount of smoke that has been drifting over the valley has been terrifying.
On Friday and Saturday night there was so much smoke in the sky that the normally ubandant stars were no where to be seen and it was so dark outside the you really couldn’t see anything past 20 meters…keep in mind that up the main fire area you probably couldn’t see past 5 or 10 meters.
On Saturday i went out and took some photos of the surrounding area and got a great photo showing just how much smoke was around.
These two photos were taken from exactly the same spot about 100km north east of Melbourne.
The bottom photo was taken on November 26 2006 in the late afternoon around 4pm and the top photo was taken on December 9 2006 around 11am.
The whole Upper Yarra Valley was like this and even worse in parts and it really reminded me of whats its like up there in winter when the heavy snow clouds roll-in.
To top it off, (according to the Age newspaper) on Sunday the 10th of December, Melbourne also a had its sixth hottest December day on record since 1898 (and its hottest day since 1953) as it reached a blistering 42.1 degrees celsius with it getting even hotter in parts of rural Victoria.
The fire season has well and truly kicked in early and based on the amount of under-growth on the mountains and the lack of rain this could be one of the worst seasons ever with fire behaviour experts warning that the 12 seperate fires may merge into two or three “super fires” soon as well.
The scary thing is that if it doesn’t happen this year, when it finally does happen it will just be worse…somethings you just can’t get away from if you decide to live in the mountains.
Oh yeah…and you can’t forget to mention the great (and incredibly dangerous) job that the volunteers of the CFA (Country Fire Authority), the members of DSE (Department of Sustainability and Environment) and all the numerous other people from the multitude of other organisations who are out on the frontlines doing what they can to stop or control these fires…well done guys.
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