WORST CASE SCENARIO = MEGAFIRE - The front of the State Mine fire near Lithgow already extends across hundreds of kilometres, and authorities have warned it may not take long for it to join the Mount Victoria fire to the south. Under what they said this morning was the worst possible scenario, it could also merge with the Linksview Road fire in Springwood, to the south-east, which destroyed almost 200 homes on Thursday. Dr Owen Price, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong, says there is a risk that a combined fire could produce so much energy it could create its own weather conditions. You can get these conditions, what you call a pyrocumulus, where a fire is producing so much energy it punches up through the troposphere a huge plume of smoke, essentially creating a thunderstorm with lots and lots of energy in it, he said. Then it starts to suck in air from all around, so theres more oxygen and it feeds back on itself so the fire behaviour goes really extreme. Unfortunately under those conditions when its creating its own weather you can get things like tornados occurring. If two big fires coalesce together theyre sort of pooling their energy together, so you can get feedback that makes them even more intense. Dr Price says fires that serious can become impossible to fight. abc.net.au/news/2013-10-21/blue-mountains-blazes-threaten-to-combine-into-mega-fire/5035880
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 09:47:45 +0000
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