Update for Vinegar Hill area - Lilydale Creek Catchment

I've just been up on the hill behind our house with a compass and binoculars and have tried to map out where the fire front is at present.

Please bear in mind that this is only "apparent" - a lot of the front is behind ridges and is only inferred from the smoke, and sometimes it is not clear whether it is behind one ridge or two.

click to enlarge

For scale, the horizontal (E-W boundary running across the bottom third of the shot is 2.1km.  I am reasonably sure of the position of the front where it crosses the topmost bearing, and of the position in the mouth of the valley of the next tributary south, and of the position where the front meets the southernmost bearing. Most of the rest is conjecture.

Where earlier I had thought that the wind was becoming erratic and worried that it might be going to swing SW or W, it has now come back to blowing strongly, if intermittently, from the east, so is pushing the fire away from houses in the area at present.  However you should watch the wind carefully.  In yesterday's strong W and SW winds the fire front was sometimes moving at 1km per hour.  I'd estimate at present that the front is moving into the wind at something over 100m per hour - and much faster where it goes up slopes out of the wind.

The last I heard from QPWS (about 9.30am I think) was that the fire-fighting focus has been on the Sandy Creek Road area, which is downwind from the fire on parts of Wallers Road, and that that area has had priority for the very scarce fire crew/vehicle resources - there are a lot of other fires around SEQ.  No crews were available then for the southern Wallers Road / Vinegar Hill area, but were being actively sought from QFRS.

The fire in the Sandy Creek area was threatening houses on the southern side of Sandy Creek Road about one hour ago, and there were bulldozers working behind the houses to make containment lines.  The top bearing above was not only the limit, so far as I could see, of the fire in the main Lilydale Creek valley, but was also pointing directly to a very strong plume of smoke from the other side of Wallers Road, possibly in the Sandy Creek area.