Firestorm

Firestorm: Day 1

Bush fire - 2013

Thursday - 17/10/13

We have had the hottest twelve months ever recorded.

It has been the hottest winter on record.

It has been the hottest september ever recorded.

We have had three days over 35 degrees C already. 

Alice Springs had 42.5 last week, the hottest october day ever recorded.

Oh, and of course the idiots are still preaching that there is no global warming.

I wish they would go live on a sea level island somewhere and let the rest of us get on with trying to fix the pollution.

It is now the second week of october, of spring, yet we are in summer.

All the spring flowers have finished with the jonquils finishing flowering before spring had even started. My vegetables are bolting to flower before they can develop properly, it is just too hot too early. My nectarine and plum trees are covered in leaf and fruit a month ahead of normal. We will have ripe nectarines before the end of spring.

The black mulberries have finished and flying foxes have already arrived and are eating out the persian white mulberry. These are my favourite and taste like figs. The flying foxes don't usually arrive till November giving us a month of harvest, but not this year.

Only the apples, pears and walnuts still think its spring. We're getting a dozen eggs a day now but the chooks run out of water every day. I will have to give them all extra water containers this weekend. I'm renewing the little ponds for the ducks and geese every second day as it's so hot that they're turning them to mud in two days instead of 4 or 5. It is just too hot.

We have a 100 fires burning around the state now, with the closest to my home about 50 km north west of us. It may seem a long way but with a 50k/h north westerly wind it would reach the cliffs on the other side of our valley by the evening. We had a day like that last week, 38 degrees and a norwester and the evacuation standby orders went out.

The sky was clear this morning and I'm in my city clinic today. I could see the plumes of the fires far off in the west.

All my patients are stressed and the rates of asthma and sinus and allergies has skyrocketed. I've recommended Chrysanthemum flower and Marshmallow root tea as a general tonic for most. It will help keep them cool and prevent damage to the upper respiratory tract – the throat and nose – and to cope with the hot dry, dusty and now smoky air.

It's lunch time and the plumes of smoke have turned into a dense cloud that blankets the city.

The sun shines through a dull injured orange and everybody is worried. There is such a sense of foreboding. I hear stories from my patients about roads closed and now the highway. Firestorms have occurred at a number of the fires because the winds are up to 90k/h in places. Whole towns are ablaze and hundreds of homes feared destroyed.

I message friends to check there ok and let the wife know about the road closures. I check the weather radar web site and the smoke clouds show as widespread thick storm clouds – except for their shape. They start from a point and then spread out downwind.

It looks like it will be a long night.

and