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Australian fire zone a crime scene, say police; death toll rises to 166
By TANALEE SMITH
Associated Press Writer
6:14 PM EST, February 9, 2009
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WHITTLESEA, Australia (AP) — Police declared incinerated towns crime
scenes Monday, and the prime minister spoke of "mass murder" after
investigators said arsonists may have set some of Australia's worst
wildfires in history. The death toll rose to 166.
There were no quick answers, but officials said panic and the
freight-train speed of the fire front — driven by 60 mph winds and
temperatures as high as 117 degrees Fahrenheit (47 C) — probably
accounted for the unusually high toll.
Prime Minister Kevin
Rudd, visibly upset during a television interview, reflected the
country's disgust at the idea that arsonists may have set some of the
400 fires that devastated Victoria state, or helped them jump
containment lines.
"What do you say about anyone like that?"
Rudd said. "There's no words to describe it, other than it's mass
murder."
From the air, the landscape was blackened as far as
the eye could see. In at least one town, bodies still lay in the
streets. Entire forests were reduced to leafless, charred trunks,
farmland to ashes. Victoria police spokeswoman Christie Pengally said
the death toll as of late Monday was 166.
At Kinglake, a body
covered by a white sheet lay in a yard where every tree, blade of grass
and the ground was blackened. Elsewhere in the town, the burned-out
hulks of four cars were clustered haphazardly together after an
apparent collision. Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio reported a car
in a small reservoir, the driver apparently steering there in
desperation.
"What we've seen, I think, is that people didn't
have enough time, in some cases," Victoria Police Commissioner
Christine Nixon told a news conference. "We're finding (bodies) on the
side of roads, in cars that crashed."
But there were also extraordinary tales of survival.
One man leapt into his pool to escape the flames as they roared over
his house, leaving it unscarred but razing his neighbor's. Another
woman sheltered with her children in a wombat burrow as the worst of
the fire passed.
Mark Strubing took refuge in a drainage pipe as his property outside Kinglake burned.
"We jumped in the car and we were only literally just able to outrun
this fire. It was traveling as fast as the wind," Strubing told Nine
Network television news.
He said he and a companion rolled
around in the water at the bottom to wet their clothing as the flames
started licking the pipe: "How we didn't burn I don't know."
Elsewhere in Kinglake, Jack Barber fled just ahead of the flames with
his wife and a neighbor, driving in two cars packed with birth
certificates, insurance documents, two cats, four kittens and a dog.
"We had a fire plan," he said Monday. "The plan was to get the hell out of there before the flames came."
With their escape route blocked by downed power lines and a tree, they
took shelter first at a school, then — when that burned — in an exposed
cricket ground ringed by trees, where they found five others.
"All around us was 100-foot (30-meter) flames ringing the oval, and we
ran where the wind wasn't. It was swirling all over the place," Barber
said. "For three hours, we dodged the wind."
The Victoria Country Fire Service said some 850 square miles (2,200 square kilometers) were burned out.
More than a dozen fires still burned uncontrollably across the state,
though conditions were much cooler than on Saturday, when the wind
surged and changed direction quickly time and again, fanning the blazes
and making their direction utterly unpredictable from minute to minute.
Local media had been issuing warnings in the days leading up to the
weekend, but many people guarding their homes with backyard hoses would
have been outside when the wind changed, and thus could have missed the
new warnings.
Jim Andrews, senior meteorologist at
accuweather.com, said the combination of record high heat, high winds,
gusts and low humidity created a perfect storm scenario for the fires.
"I cannot fathom in my mind anything more, hellish, firewise," he said.
"Last Saturday we had the most intense fire weather conditions we have
had in forecast history," David Packham, a research fellow in
climatology at the School of Geography & Environmental Science at
Melbourne's Monash University, said in an e-mail to journalists on
Monday. He said the heat and a recent lack of rain made it clear days
before the weekend that "conditions were in place for a disaster to
occur."
At least 750 homes were destroyed Saturday, the Victoria Country Fire Service said.
Officials said both the tolls of human life and property would almost
certainly rise as they reached deeper into the disaster zone, and
forecasters said temperatures would rise again later in the week,
posing a risk of further flare-ups.
Police Commissioner Nixon
said investigators had strong suspicions that at least one of the
deadly blazes — known as the Churchill fire after a ruined town — was
deliberately set. And it could not be ruled out for other fires. She
cautioned against jumping to conclusions.
The country's top law
officer, Attorney General Robert McClelland, said people found to have
deliberately set fires could face murder charges. Murder can carry a
life sentence.
Police sealed off Maryville, a town destroyed by
another fire, with checkpoints, telling residents who fled and news
crews they could not enter because there were still bodies in the
streets. Armed officers moved through the shattered landscape taking
notes, pool news photographs showed.
John Handmer, a wildfire
safety expert at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, said
research had shown that people in the path of a blaze must get out
early or stay inside until the worst has past.
"Fleeing at the
last moment is the worst possible option," he said. "Sadly, this
message does not seem to have been sufficiently heeded this weekend
with truly awful consequences in Victoria."
Even if a house is
set ablaze, it will burn more slowly and with less intensity than a
wildfire and residents have a better chance of escape, he said.
Victoria state Premier John Brumby on Monday announced a commission
would be held to examine all aspects of the fires, including warning
policies.
"I think our policy has served us well in what I call
normal conditions. These were unbelievable circumstances," Brumby said
on Australian Broadcasting Corp. television.
Blazes have been
burning for weeks across several states in southern Australia. A
long-running drought in the south — the worst in a century — had left
forests extra dry and Saturday's fire conditions in Victoria were said
to be the worst ever in Australia.
In New South Wales state on
Monday, a 31-year-old man appeared in court charged with arson in
connection with a wildfire that burned north of Sydney over the
weekend. No loss of life was reported there. He faces up to 10 years in
prison.
The country's deadliest fires before the current spate
killed 75 people in 1983. In 2006, nine people died on South
Australia's Eyre Peninsula.
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