I've always wondered if there was any thing you could do help protect your home, or are the temps to high to make anything you effective? is down to the building materials used? would even a fire break around the house work or would it have to be so big as to be unworkable?
Really depends on the type of wood, density of trees, size of the fire etc.
Even things like the humidity and moisture in the soil.
Over here in August the merest spark will set off a fire, absolutely everything is literally tinder dry and crisp.
The fires spread simply by the wind picking up embers, carrying them away, the embers then fall on the tinder dry ground, grass etc and another forest fire is set off literally miles away from the original one.
Our house was a good 50m away from the nearest tree.
We were/are very anal about not having vegetation around the property, it was a concrete rebar house with terracotta clay tiles, there was some wood as roofing joists but nothing more.
It still burnt to the ground with a heat so intense it cracked and crumbled the concrete.
Another rough estimate of the heat generated, as kid next doors shed was set on fire by some kids.
Typical shed stuff inside nothing really flammable and it was a good 20m away, as quick as me Dad could douse the side of the house with a hose it evaporated, the heat was THAT intense it actually melted my bedroom window.
Again this was 20m away.
So i'm doubtful anything could stop your house burning down this side of thousands and thousand of litres of water.
Another thing worth mentioning though, is when our property burnt down in 97 the first thing we lost was water.
The heat burst the pipes.
Yet another statistic to give you some idea of the heat involved.
Most the planes and helicopters are capable of dumping between 4000 litres and nearly 18,000 litres on a fire in seconds.
To watch these though and the little impact they have on the fire, you'd be forgiven for thinking the pilot is only peeing on the fire.
2 years ago we had a fire on mountain behind our house, we had 4 planes and 3 helicopters in constant rotation on what was essentially an extremely small fire of and area less than 1 square km.
2 of the helicopters were absolute monsters as well.
I snapped a few pics, hope no one minds me putting them up?
The first was a Erickson air-crane, that carries 114,000 litres of water.
The other the absolutely enormous Mi-26TP.
This alone carries an astonishing 17,260 litres of water.
It took these 7 aircraft 5 hours to quash the flames enough that the on-the-ground firemen could get close enough to physically breath, (you suffocate in a forest fire way before you burn).
So i think it's difficult to imagine the kind of heat put out by these wildfires.
Cheers
Mark
