Dear All,
As I advised yesterday we were in for a hot dry day with low humidity
yesterday; the prediction was for 44 °C. It turned out that the
temperature at the Avalon airport near Geelong was the hottest place
in the state. The temperature there reached 46.9°C at 15:00 with winds
gusting between 10 km/h and 60 km/h. See http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDV60801/IDV60801.94854.shtml
Fortunately for us there were no bush fires within 50 kilometres of
Geelong, but more than 200 fires were reported from other parts of the
state of Victoria — 11 of these are regarded as major fires burning
areas of up to 30 000 hectares — these fires are still active.
One of the government owned radio stations (Australian Broadcasting
Commission or ABC 774) becomes an emergency information service under
these circumstances. You can listen to a streaming of this service
from http://www.abc.net.au/melbourne where you will notice that almost
all dimensions supplied use metric units including hectares for the
size of fires. The exceptions come from some few people who phone in
to the talk-back components. The fire services have, since the 1970s,
regarded using old pre-metric measures as a reportable offence since
it puts volunteer fire fighters lives at risk to use multiple methods
of measurement. I think that the ABC does an excellent job of
providing this emergency bush fire information - you might like to
listen for a while to see how we manage this kind of service in
Australia.
By the way, as I listen to the radio, I think of hectares like this:
1 I hear of a fire that is estimated as 165 hectares
2 I take the square root of the number: sqrt (165) = 13 (approx.)
3 Multiply 13 by 100 = 1300 metres.
4 I think of this is a fire that, as a square, would be about 1.3
kilometres by 1.3 kilometres.
Let me repeat this for one of the larger fire that is estimated to be
30 000 hectares
1 I hear of a fire that is estimated as 30 000 hectares
2 I take the square root of the number: sqrt (30 000) = 170 (approx.)
3 Multiply 170 by 100 = 17 000 metres.
4 I think of this is a fire that, as a square, would be about 17
kilometres by 17 kilometres.
A square in this particular case works well enough because these fires
were burning with north-westerly winds before a cool change arrived
from the south-west in such a way that one edge of some large fires
changed to the front of the fire. We are fortunate that the south-
westerly change has meant that the temperature today has dropped for
the western half of the state to the mid 20s. The lower temperatures
mean higher humidity so these weather factors should be helpful to the
roughly 3000 mostly volunteer fire fighters.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the
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