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The second wave of the cool change has come through, bringing with it a few drops of rain.

It’s not even enough to settle the dust yet, but at least it’s something.

The wind has dropped to almost nothing as well, which is a blessing.

Earlier today the wind was averaging 50-60km/hr with gusts up to 90km/hr at those record temperatures I mentioned. It was that searingly hot northerly wind, combined with 6% humidity (typical hot dry summer wind) that posed such a bushfire danger.

Further east, in the worst of the fires, the wind is still blowing hard. As this second light change drifts across the state the fire fronts will slow and the CFA will be much better placed to attack. It’s not there yet though; as you can see from this updated radar image the majority of the smoke from the fires is still being driven by a strong, hot north-westerly.

The left-hand side of that smoke plume is the Kilmore fires (as noted on the map). The right-hand side is a combination of the Murrundindi and Bunyip fires.

This is the current weather bureau radar image. It covers a large chunk of central Victoria. (We’re in the upper left corner, just west of Castlemaine.)

That blue overlay would usually indicate where the rain is. Thing is, there’s no rain in Victoria today.

Today, that blue represents smoke. It’s dense enough the radar is detecting it as rain.

The list of current fire incidents on the CFA website is getting longer and longer. I count somewhere over 550.

Fires are currently well out of control in Bunyip (east of Melbourne), Kilmore (north), Coleraine (south west), Murrundindi (north-east), Churchill (south east) and many other places.

It reached 47.9 degrees at Avalon today; that’s 118 on the old scale. Certainly the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded in Victoria by a long way — the old record was 114.

That previous record was set on Black Friday — January 13, 1939. Easily the worst bushfires in Australian history, and according to the wikipedia article, one of the worst fire events anywhere in the world. There were 71 fatalities that day. Almost 5 million acres of land was burnt. Several towns were completely destroyed. 3,700 buildings were lost.

All the news reports say that today’s fire danger exceeds that day 70 years ago. If we get away as easily as we have so far we’ll be lucky.

We’re certainly better prepared to fight fires today compared to then (Elvis, anyone?) but days like this nature has the upper hand. There’s already been a lot of property loss today; I just hope there’s no loss of life. I know one firefighter has already been badly injured; my thoughts are with his family for a full recovery. This is a bad day for bushfires though, and we’ll be pretty lucky to get through without loss of life.

A cool change has thankfully come through the western half of the state, but for the CFA that just means the temperature drops and the wind changes direction. There’s no rain in this change at all, so it doesn’t help much when you’re facing 20km long fire fronts.

Quite a storm coming through tonight. Lots of thunder, lightning and scared dogs. Not as much rain as we’d like, but at least there’s some.

As promised, a couple of shots of the snow I encountered on the way to town this morning. I’ll get some more up on to flickr in the next day or so.

It is really, really unusual to have snow on the Calder. Mt Macedon certainly has dustings of snow fairly regularly at this time of year, but to be this low down is rare. I’ve certainly never seen it before.

It was very cold when I left home this morning. The sky was pretty clear though (in fact, cloudless) and there was no hint of frost. I came down the Calder and somewhere around the Carlsruhe area there were some signs of ice on the road. Pretty soon it was snowing and visibility was down around 100 metres. Everyone was crawling along; lots of people were stopped and taking photos with their mobile phones. I had the D80 with me so I pulled that out; I’ll try and get some photos online tonight when I get home. There has been snow on top of Mt Macedon recently, but to snow on the Calder itself is pretty unusual.

This picture pretty much sums up the sad state of Lake Eppalock. There’s no water for miles around.

The lake is around 5% full according to the camp staff. When I was here as a kid the water was just below the tree line here.

As I said in an earlier post, I have no memories of the camp itself, but do remember there was water here.

I’ve had the odd windy plane landing, but nothing like this. Check the video.

While I was driving home yesterday I went through some of the most torrential rain I’ve ever had to drive in.

On the road between Elphinstone and Castlemaine (through Chewton, etc) there was tree debris all over the road and it was raining so hard I could barely see. I had the Falcon wipers on full and as soon as the wiper moved the windscreen was covered in water again. I would have pulled over except I knew there was a truck somewhere just behind me, but I had no idea where. Visibility really was absolutely dreadful. It cleared up a little once I got into Castlemaine itself, and the drive over the Moolort plains was just fine.

Once I got into Maryborough it was clear just how much water we’d got. There were huge puddles everywhere. Pulling into our court I saw Lisa’s car was at Peter & Diane’s — just in front of the SES car. I figured this couldn’t be good.

When I pulled into the driveway Peter and Lisa were bucketing water out of the bungalow. It turns out that the dam next door had overflowed in the rain and most of that runoff had gone through the bungalow. At one point it was under 2 feet of water. Everything on the floor was soaking wet.

I took over from Lisa because she’d spent 2 hours cleaning up, and by the time Peter and knocked off it was 9:30pm. Even then the floor was still damp, and of course nothing that got wet has dried out yet. We got more rain this morning, but nothing like the downpour yesterday afternoon.

The Kids had been left at Lisa’s parents while the mop-up was going on, so I ducked over there to take some baby formula over for the little one. The big one decided to come back with me and spent a few hours trying not to get in the way.

While she was there she found half a dozen yabbies wandering around the driveway. They all got dropped in the dam. I suspect they had been washed out of next door’s dam when it overflowed.

We had planned to phone Grandma Elli to wish her a happy birthday once I got home, but the evening disappeared really quickly. Lisa and The Kid had got a present for Grandma too, but when I left home very early Thursday morning I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I didn’t get to take it down! We’ll phone Grandma some time this morning to wish her a happy birthday (and I’ll apologise for not taking her present down).

I can’t see any way we can go today. The rain is heading north-west, so the whole Ballarat/Beaufort area is going to get absolutely drenched over the next few hours. You can see the wind vectors around that whole area; it’s circling around to cover that whole area.

It’s a shame; we’ll have to wait another 6 months for the next event.