NARRATION

Ten years ago, our nation's capital was ravaged by one of the country's worst
fires. Four lives were lost, and over 500 homes. But the extent of the
devastation caused by the Canberra fires baffled scientists and emergency
services.
Dr Jason Sharples
It was a pretty big shock, 'cause I mean, there's nothing really in the literature
which suggests the fire should spread that fast, or could spread that fast.
NARRATION
In the aftermath, it was clear that the worst damage was due to something
much more savage than an ordinary firestorm.
Rick McRae
There was a police car that was picked off the ground and dumped into a
stormwater drain. There was a series of streets on the southern edge of
Chapman, which had suffered severe wind damage as well as fire damage, and
that was difficult to explain.
NARRATION
What hit Canberra had never before been documented in science.
Cameraman
Holy shit!
NARRATION
A fire tornado. On January the 8th, 2003, a huge, dry lightning storm struck in
multiple places across the ACT, sparking a large number of fires. One of the
biggest began here in the Brindabella Ranges. But for days, fire conditions
weren't particularly alarming.
Stephen Wilkes
Very orderly fire behaviour. Very orderly progression across the landscape.
NARRATION
Then, on the 18th of January, the situation turned catastrophic. Dry westerly
winds came into play. Temperatures reached 37 degrees, causing surface air to
mix with the upper atmosphere, creating strong gusts.
Anja Taylor
It's an incredible view.
Stephen Wilkes

So the fire started over there in the valley. It steadily moved along that ridge
until it got to a point into fresh fuel, and this whole area was ignited within
about 20 minutes.
Anja Taylor
This whole area?
Stephen Wilkes
This whole area was alight.
Rick McRae
At that stage, it was perhaps the biggest fire event that this area had seen for
quite a long time.
NARRATION
Stephen Wilkes was in a chopper at 2pm that day mapping the fire.
Stephen Wilkes
I was trying very hard to find out where the front of the fire was to give us an
idea of how fast it was coming into town, and there was no front. The fire had
broken up into thousands of smaller fires. We were seeing things that none of
us had ever seen, knowing things were wrong, but not being able to make any
sense of it. Suddenly it all went quiet, and the chopper pilot turned to me and
said, 'Steve, I don't think we're gonna get out of here,' and I looked around and
I realised that if I panicked at all, I was probably dead. As we left, I took a
photograph of what I saw was a slight rotation, and some light coming through
the plume, and we believe that was pretty close prior to the tornado forming.
To be honest with you, I've only recently realised how lucky I was.
NARRATION
The next day, Stephen returned to document the damage.
Stephen Wilkes
We were speechless, we were devastated. The houses that were alight and
wind damage that was done. There were massive trees - fully mature yellow
box trees - just torn up out of the ground, moved a few metres, and dumped.
What kept coming to my mind was a tornado.
NARRATION
In the science literature, fire tornados didn't exist but as researchers slowly
pieced together information from aerial and ground surveys, no other
explanation fit.
Rick McRae

This is the damage path that was mapped from the air soon after the event,
and it shows it extending from around Mr Coree through to the suburb of
Kambah.
Anja Taylor
That looks quite a long path.
Rick McRae
It extends a total of 25 kilometres. It was just under half a kilometre in width
before it hit the city.
NARRATION
Whatever ripped through the suburb of Chapman hit the Pierce Pine Plantation
first. Amidst the blackened trunks, it left a distinctive trail of destruction.
Rick McRae
The trees had all been snapped off at about 3 metres above the ground. The
alignment of the trees left lying on the ground was indicative of a vortex.
NARRATION
Softwood trees, like pines, can only snap off when wind speeds reach a level
equivalent to 2 on the Fujita Scale of tornado intensity, the highest being 5. At
this strength, trees can be uprooted, cars lifted off the ground, and roofs torn
off.
Rick McRae
All of this supported our claim that the wind speeds were around 250
kilometres per hour.
NARRATION
But ironically, the real clincher was areas where there was no damage at all.
Rick McRae
The key part of it is the fact that these gaps are in here. A tornado is able to lift
off from the ground and reattach later, and these gaps support the notion that
it is a tornado. The alternate hypothesis, a fire whirl, isn't able to lift off from
the ground. It's attached to the hot fire ground.
NARRATION
As the evidence came together, extraordinary images emerged of the tornado
itself, helping to define the characteristics of the vortex.
Dr Jason Sharples
The tornado in the photo corresponds to about 2cm, so that means that the

base of the tornado must have been about half a kilometre wide there.
Rick McRae
Half a kilometre. That's amazing.
NARRATION
It's 4pm in Kambah District playing fields, a very different-looking afternoon to
when Tom Bates stood here watching the fire roar over the hill.
Anja Taylor
So where did you first see the tornado coming?
Tom Bates
Oh, on Mount Arawang here. It arced across the top of the hill. Spot fires along
the bottom.
Anja Taylor
Yeah?
Tom Bates
Stood up on this side. It was just like a great big wave ready to burst.
NARRATION
Incredibly, Tom caught the moment on film.
Tom Bates
I've never in my life seen anything like it. Holy mackerel!
NARRATION
At the far right, the funnel of the tornado comes into view.
Tom Bates
This is rather frightening. Oh, I'm getting pelted with stuff. Stinging the
daylights out of me. Sheets of tin floating. You can hear it in the camera. Power
lines going down.
Rick McRae
No-one has captured a tornado like that as clearly in a fire situation before. One
of the interesting things about the video was a pair of football goalposts in the
foreground - that gave us a measurement stick in the vertical direction, so we
could go out to where the video was taken and we could measure the speed of
movement over the ground, and also the wind speeds within the vortex. We
were able to estimate the vertical wind speed of over 150 kilometres per hour.

NARRATION
Scientifically documenting a fire tornado was a world first, but that left a vital
and more important research question. How could a series of relatively
contained fires develop so quickly into such a violent, pyro-convective event?
Dr Jason Sharples
I guess I was really interested in trying to understand what caused the
thunderstorm, which spawned the tornado.
NARRATION
In the multispectral line scans taken on the day, Dr Jason Sharples was struck
with the same puzzling images again and again - sections of the fire spreading
sideways.
Dr Jason Sharples
These are instances where the fire, where it would normally be spreading
downwind, have started actually spreading across wind, and what we found
were these instances, without exception, were connected with lee-facing
slopes.
Anja Taylor
I'm on a lee-facing slope, facing away from hot westerly winds. Normally these
are considered the sheltered sides - the safest areas to take cover from a fire but in the case of the Canberra fires, it was these slopes that burnt the fastest
and the most intensely.
Dr Jason Sharples
Framed a hypothesis that this phenomenon was being caused by the
interaction between the fire, the wind, and the terrain, so what we did in
Portugal was to try and emulate these conditions in a combustion tunnel.
NARRATION
In the experiments, the fire behaved exactly as it did in Canberra, racing up the
lee slope and channelling sideways as it hit the headwind. Multiple spot fires
were created, igniting large tracts of the slope. Before these experiments
confirmed it, no-one knew a fire could behave in this way. Here's what's going
on. The wind travels up slope, but as it hits the crest, it's moving too fast to
follow the terrain, and lifts off, swirling back on itself in an eddy. The fire moves
with it, and the disastrous result is that two sides of the hill light up at the same
time with extraordinary speed.
Dr Jason Sharples
It turns a small fire into a very big fire very quickly. Rather than spreading as a
fire front, as it normally would, it causes what we call deep flaming. So that's

where you get large tracts of the landscape all igniting in a relatively short
amount of time.
NARRATION
The intense and deep flaming caused by the fire-channelling events happened
immediately before the thunderstorm formed.
Anja Taylor
With such a huge area alight, a massive amount of energy was released into
the atmosphere. In fact, in the peak ten minutes of flaming, more energy was
released than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
NARRATION
The massive smoke plume of heat and moisture formed a gigantic pyro
cumulonimbus cloud - a huge supercell thunderstorm. Stephen took these
incredible photographs as it formed. As the moist, hot fire plume is lifted into
the upper atmosphere, it's hit by upper level winds of a different speed and
direction, setting up a vortex, and a tornado is born. As for fire tornados, the
team hopes never to see another one, but they're even more hopeful that their
discoveries on fire behaviour may one day save lives.
Rick McRae
When it comes to an extreme fire, we have learned an awful lot about how to
stay safe, and how to protect the community. The real challenge now is getting
those learnings out, right across the bushfire industry.