An almost unnoticed fire at Vinegar Hill

Fire in Lilydale Creek Vinegar Hill, less than an hour after it started and half an hour after we saw it

It is almost spooky reading back over my last post on the origins of smoke in the Hills - and in particular my comments about the fire conditions on the morning of Friday 16th when I was writing.

Less than an hour after I finished that post I was helping one of our neighbours deal with what was probably the worst bushfire I've experienced.  Temperatures were in the high 30s, humidity was in the low 20s, the wind gusts were strong enough to drive a 4m high flame completely horizontal along the ground, and there was a lot of dry vegetation in areas that had not burned for years.

I won't go into the details here - there's a post on it on our blog - but it was also remarkable for the fact that it almost certainly started from a burned log or dead tree that had been quietly smouldering for around three weeks since the late October fire that burned out 5,000 ha of the southern Hills, and had survived more than 60mm of rain in that time.  This is very similar to the fire a couple of months ago in the section of Lockyer National Park west of Seventeen Mile Road that re-ignited after a period of weeks (and after a similar amount of rain had fallen).

Two days later, after more than 100mm of rain, areas of this fire were still smoking.

Only one of the Smokespotters reported this smoke, probably because the strong wind was holding the smoke down in the gullies and dispersing it before it could rise, but also because the location is on the southern side of the Hills (overlooking Gatton) and is hidden from many Smokespotters by the major ridge along which Seventeen Mile Road runs.