RFS Commissioner Fitzsimmons has delivered his final update for the evening noting it is still “very dangerous across active firegrounds.”
News of the southerly change,which has already started to sweep across NSW,continues to be an issue for firefighters. Mr Fitzsimmons took the time to explain why.
“The simple description is when we got very strong north-westerly winds driving fire behaviour,you get a fire that spreads generally in an easterly direction or a south-easterly direction and it's usually a large elongated firefront that moves out in that south-easterly direction,” he said.
“The head is relatively small in width but the flanks of the fire become very long,” he said.
When a southerly change hits,that long flank becomes a “very wide progressive firefront” that suddenly moves in a northerly direction,pushing back against the firefighters.
“Historically,when men used to be the only firefighters,it was called the dead man zone because historically too many firefighters were killed on the northern flanks of fires in that southerly change,” he added.