Slashdot Mirror
Bushfires Destroy Historic Mt. Stromlo Observatory
Anthony writes "The historic Mt Stromlo observatory has been destroyed by fires. Unfortunately Google cache and similar archives are the only available detailed information. Looks like the web site was housed at the observatory. Telescopes housed there were 74" and 50" reflectors along with the "Oddie" 9" refractor used by the Canberra Astronomical Society. Also destroyed were a number of student houses and workshops. The view from the air is one of molten domes and twisted metal. These fires have already destroyed 388 houses in the suburbs of Canberra. Luckily the winds have not picked up today, but the danger is still high."
"The historic Mt Stromlo observatory has been destroyed by fires. Unfortunately Google cache and similar archives are the only available detailed information. Looks like the web site was housed at the observatory."
/. story?
Did the fire that destroyed the site happen before or after the
The CNN article doesn't mention the observatory but does have some other details about the fires.
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
This is an interesting article about why some forest fires are more destructive than they could be.
"Let's give a good Slashdotting before the Observatory passed away..."
Let's all bow our heads and press F5 for a 21-megabit salute.
The area outside Canberra, Australia's equivalent of Washington, has been on fire for a few days. Yesterday things got much worse and the fires spread over a huge area, eventually reaching the urban areas.
Atleast 400 homes have been destroyed, and 3 people are known to be dead.
I myself was watching the fires during the day as they got closer and closer to urban areas. (The City of Canberra was designed before it was built and there are lots of bush areas between suburbs). When the wind picked up the fires were spreading over huge areas, and I could see flames about 30ft high, taller than the trees they were burning down.
The sky was completely covered in smoke all day, and it was very dark even at 3:30pm. Traffic was frantic and everyone had their lights on. At the supermarket people were desperately stocking up on food supplies.
A few hours later the dried-grassy area right next to my suburb (Monash) caught fire.. some people were evacuating their homes, while others were desperately putting water on their roofs.
After watching the fires get closer and closer to our homes for about 10 minutes, a group of about 40 of us decided to cross the road and put out the fire ourselves. Some people had buckets of water and the rest used branches ripped off nearby trees.
As we got near the flames we realised how hot the fire was. I could hear people yelling "God that's hot" and "fuck that burns".
We hit the flames with our branches and put out the fire bit by bit. At the same time people ran across with water, tipping it on the fire quickly but surely. Once we'd cleared a certain amount we could get through to the lake just beyond the fire, and some people ran down and filled up their bottles etc and then continued fighting the fire with the water from the lake.
It was difficult to breathe and most people were wearing a tshirt or cloth over their faces. Every few minutes I had to stop and get some breath and try to clear my eyes. There was a sense of communion and group-effort.. everyone working together towards the same ends. We had gone from people who wouldn't notice each other walking down the street to people who were going out of their way to save their homes.
After a while we had cleared all the fire, and we stood around relieved.. I was covered in sweat from the heat, and I had ashes all over my clothes. The others who had also been running back and forth stomping out the fires were in a similar condition.
Once we were sure all the fire was out, as we were looking at ourselves and surveying the charred grounds, someone amongst us triumphantly said "Better than watching our houses burn down!". I agreed.
The fire started when some of the lab's employees got drunk and decided to see who could burn more ants using the telescope.
Professor Frink was in the lead with 13 when they all made another alcohol run and accidently bumped the telescope leaving it pointed at a pile of oily rags in their rush to get "shotgun".
We say 'Bushfires' here in Australia. Brush fire sounds like you're taking personal grooming way too seriously.
Robert Anton Wilson
A duplicate within the story. Sources within the Slashdot editing staff were quoted as saying, "We're not going to wait for someone else to submit the story again, we decided to be preemtive, and duplicate the story ourselves!"
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
The fires have been burning for weeks in one form or another, yesterday a combination of old fires and new ones reached Canberra. Canberra is often called "the bush capital", it's a city embedded in bushland. So things could have been a LOT worse.
...
The weather was hot hot hot - 37 Celsius. Strong dry winds coming in off a thousand kilometres of desert to the northwest. It hasn't rained here for about 9 months, Australia is currently in the worst drought for generations, so all the forest is tinder dry. Australian eucalypt leaves have a relatively high oil content, when they start buring the canopy can literally explode.
I was driving earlier in the day, and all I could see to the west was a bank of smoke covering the entire horizon. As the day progressed the smoke covered the city downwind of the fires. It was a thick black cloud, like a heavy thunderstorm. At my house the smoke was pretty high up, so the air at groundlevel was fine, just a little smoke smell.
Things could still be pretty bad. Although hundreds of houses were lost, and fire stations, schools, medical centres and so on, all this is really just on the western edge of the city. The city has many other areas which are just as susceptible given the current drought. We're right in the middle of the hot part of summer, and even hopes for rain depend on El Nino ending around about March. If it doesn't, and we don't get rain for another year,
Getting back to the observatory, Mount Stromlo observatory is on the outskirts of the city, on a medium sized hill called, um, Mount Stromlo. Mount Stromlo had a heavy forest cover. The observatory area on the top of the hill was cleared for some distance around the domes, but I guess the fireball from tens of thousands of tons of wood all going up at once must have been overwhelming.
There were a number of houses on top of the mountain for astronomer families and support staff, I guess they must have been evacuated early on, there's only one way down from the mountain.
It's a big historic loss. The observatory has been of reducing importance in past years due to the encroaching city, but measures such as replacing street lighting with observatory friendly lighting were being undertaken. I doubt it will be rebuilt because of this.
Jamie
I think I was one of the last visitors to Mt Stromlo... I was there just before closing on Friday afternoon, and for some reason did not take any photos... That was a mistake.
There has also not been any people at the Tidbinbilla NASA facility since midnight saturday night according to reports, but it is likely not to get any damage since it is in a field rather than trees. I can assure you that I would not like to be trapped there during a fire since there was a pine forrest right arround, but from memory none closer than about 2 miles.
One of my friends evacuated his computer room at work to his house - with US$500K of equipment in his safe lounge room at home.
I am now back in Sydney... And glad to be out... There are still 750,000 people without power...
Darryl
In Australia, forests (except perhaps for rainforests) are called "the bush". So a bushfire is a forest fire.
I looked around at sites like ircache.net, vancouver-webpages.com, and elsewhere looking for a way to get pages from caches besides of course hitting them from the side of the served network (i.e. with a browser or a spider like wget or wwwwoffle).
There is a hierarchical cache at U. of Melbourne for students there, so if anyone is reading this from a dorm there you might be able to spider the cache of the site to preserve it on your hard drive.
If anyone is familiar with caching protocol and how to query other caches on the net, why not share them here. Much of the data may be on the net. Likewise if anyone knows how much is replicated on other sites it will save people the trouble. I'm just worried that the contents of these caches may expire one day soon..
This is the email running around amongst the Australian Astronomers ..
... Stromlo Observatory is effectively destroyed. All people are
...
Subject: Update on Stromlo Destruction
I have just gotten off the phone with Gary Da Costa and can confirm the
worst
accounted for which is the most important thing. All of the residential
houses, bar two, are gone, as are the 50", Yale-Columbia, Oddie, Old Admin
Building, Workshops, etc. The 74" and Visitor Centre are unaccounted for
right now, but are on the worst side of the mountain and are probably
lost. Gary is hearing that the Woolley building suffered water damage,
but may be salvageable. Nothing reported on the Duffield. In terms of
practicalities, the loss of the Workshop may be hardest to deal with.
NIFS, the instrument soon to be delivered to Gemini, is lost, and what the
loss of the workshop means for the one they had just been commissioned to
build is yet to be sorted.
More news as I hear it
Brad
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2003 12:11:30 +1100 (EST)
From: Brad Gibson
Subject: Stromlo Observatory Destroyed
As most of you are by now aware, most of south-west Canberra has been lost
to the raging bushfires. 2500 people have been evacuated thus far with
400 homes destroyed as of this morning. I am now hearing that all of
Stromlo Observatory has been destroyed. As best as I have been able to
find out, no one on the mountain has lost their lives, although at least
one person died in the Stromlo Forest Settlement. I'll pass on updats as
I hear them.
BKG
Prof. Brad K. Gibson
For those interested, most of the damage was caused not by regular fires, but by a "firestorm", burning embers raining down from the sky. This caused hundreds of spot fires around the suburbs, and in inaccessible areas, gaps between houses and fences, in power poles. This type of fire (this large) has never happened in Australia before.
m .au/National/story_45108.asp
For those blaming fire services for not being fast enough, some facts:
* The Canberra fire forces are equipped to deal with SIX house fires at the same time.
* Over FOUR HUNDRED homes have been destroyed.
Many more fires have burned and been put out by residents using garden hoses and garden tools.
Even those of you without a calculator can probably see where the problem lies.
Some suburbs have lost access to water completely, with water station pumps burned out.
One power station has been completely razed, residents in that area may be without power for a month or more.
Several fire engines and police cars have been lost, roads are blocked by fallen trees and power lines, some of which are on fire.
Firefighters have been out saving other people's homes while their own burned to the ground.
A fire station itself caught fire, and no engines went to put it out, as people's homes were still in danger.
Give them some credit for putting their lives and homes on the line, to save others.
_______________________
News links:
Residents are posting in a Canberra community at LiveJournal.
Canberra Communtiy
Google news about Canberra:
Google news
Canberra Connect Government Website (sometimes is not loading)
Canberra Connect
ACT Bushfire Status
www.esb.act.gov.au/media/bushfire.htm
Red Cross locating evacuees
www.news.com.au
Make a donation to the Red Cross
RedCross.org.au
_______________________
There's news from Observatory astronomers here
_______________________
http://news.ninemsn.co
Fires destroy Stromlo observatory
Irreplaceable equipment worth millions of dollars was destroyed when the Canberra bushfires ravaged the historic Mount Stromlo Observatory.
Research officer Vince Ford, a 38-year veteran of the observatory, told AAP staff were given 20 minutes' notice to evacuate as a fire storm on Mount Stromlo caught authorities by surprise.
A single road through pine forests links the observatory, established by the Commonwealth in 1924, with suburban Canberra.
"There's no way we could have saved it," Mr Ford said.
The fire storm destroyed all the observatory's telescopes and the original observatory building, which dated back to 1924.
"It's gone, it's all gone," Mr Ford said.
"We've lost all the telescopes, the administration building, which was the original observatory back in 1924.
"The first telescope has actually been there since 1910, it's gone.
"The main research telescopes, the 74-inch and 50-inch, they're gone. I've just seen pictures of it from the air and we don't have a telescope left."
The Australian National University (ANU) facility was one the premier astronomy training and research centres in Australia.
"(It's a huge loss) from a historical point of view, from a cultural point of view, from a scientific point of view," Mr Ford said.
"It's an absolute disaster."
Observatory staff still hope they may be able to salvage some of their research, stored on computers in office buildings that might have escaped the worst of the blaze.
The observatory offices are believed to be standing, but have been water damaged.
"At least we should be able to recover the hard disks from some of the computers, but at this stage we're guessing," Mr Ford said.
"All we know is the observatory is gone."
Some back-up files would also have been stored at the main ANU campus in Canberra.
"But a lot of the work will be at the observatory," Mr Ford said.
"Some of us, being suspicious sods, have stuff at home, but most of it would have been on the computers or in the offices up at the observatory."
ANU vice-chancellor Ian Chubb was due to meet observatory chiefs to be briefed on the extent of the damage. ©AAP 2003
The Vice Chancellor for the University was just on the local radio and vowed that the observatory will be rebuilt. I suppose while light pollution may diminish its value to research, it is an exceptional educational facility (plus the street lights around here have been replaced with mercury vapour lamps over the years).
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
The loss of Mt. Stromlo Observatory facility is very great loss.
Established in 1924, the Commonwealth Observatory at Mount Stromlo, on the outskirts of Canberra. Commonwealth Observatory was recognized for its important research into the origin and future of the universe.
Astronomers at Mount Stromlo made outstanding contributions to astronomy. It would be difficult to list all of the important contributions to Astronomy made by the people working at Mt. Stromlo. Now, a few come to mind:
One of the principal instruments at Stromlo was the 74-inch (188-cm) reflecting telescope. The 74-inch telescope was erected in 1953, and until the completion in 1974 of the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring, this was the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. In 1982, it was used to discover the fossil star CD-38245: a star so old that it is made almost purely of gases left over from the big bang.
It also was home scopes such as the robotic 50-inch (127-cm). It was an excellent example of how an older telescope could be outfitted with new controls and instruments to perform innovative work. The MACHO project was conducted on the 50 inch.
Two historical scopes come to mind, the Oddie, and the Yale-Columbia telescope:
The Oddie, was a wonderful 9-inch Newtonian telescope. The Victorian MP, James Oddie, presented this telescope to the Commonwealth government for use in the proposed Commonwealth Observatory. It was installed on the site at "Mt Strom" (as Stromlo was originally known) in September 1911. Over the years the Oddie telescope has made valuable contributions to Southern Hemisphere astronomy; it did some of the first measurements of the brightness, color and spectral classification of southern stars.
The Yale-Columbia telescope, 26-inch Grubb long-focus refractor was erected at this site for the determination of parallaxes of southern stars (it was the largest refractor in the southern hemisphere when first installed.
Moreover, there were other scopes as well ...
But alas, from what can be seen
from the air at this time, most, if not
all of those
telescopes have been lost.
At appears that heat from the burning of the
nearby
bush /trees was hot enough to melt
many of the domes at the observatory.
The Canberra Astronomical Society used the Stromlo lecture hall for their monthly meetings. During public nights, the public had access to a domed C14 scope, the Oddie, and a number of scopes brought to the site by members ... all through the hard work and generous
efforts of the
Canberra
Astronomical Society.
I had the privilege of observing at Mt Stromlo several times and spoke at one of the CAS meetings. I still can recall flying down from the US to a CAS member's home to see SN1987, . I was there only 36 hours after the naked eye supernova was first observed. I still recall seeing the single star, at a distance of over 168,000 light-years, change in color and rightness over the course of an evening. I was one of the most important astronomical events I have had the honor to witness. I recall that every scope up at Mt Stromlo was all pointed at the Large Magellanic Could where SN 1987A was blazing away. The previous observing board schedule was cancelled as people raced to collect as much early critical data as they could in the early hours of the event.
I had the privilege of being with the members of the Canberra Astronomical Society on two of my several total solar eclipses: 1991 in Hawaii, US and most recently the 2001 eclipse in Ceduna, AU.
I look forward to meeting with many of these same people when we go to Antarctica for the 2003 solar eclipse.My best wishes and heart felt sorrow go out to all of those people who worked so hard to make Mt. Stromlo such a wonderful place for the public to visit and who helped the observatory make many important contributions to Astronomy. Much of what was lost cannot be replaced. Still it is my hope that those who are left will be able to rebuild something anew out this tragedy.
chongo (was here)
I don't know if it's the worst in terms of loss of life. I think Ash Wednesday still holds the lead there.
But yes, it does seem to be one of the worst fires ever in terms of property loss.
The other week there was a fire here that threatened our town, it was the biggest fire I've ever seen in real life. I couldn't believe how quickly it raced up the hill that I'd been standing on only a week or two before taking photos. Simply, I would have been incinerated - there was no outrunning it. I watched the CFS chase after the front in vain, then minutes later it spread to the adjacent hill and went out of control in a gust of wind and little firefighters were running for their lives from tornadoes of flame. I could see occasional clouds of black smoke mixed in amongst the rest of the smoke, which my neighbor (retired CFS) said were from feral olive trees exploding! Yes, he (and others) say they explode like bombs! The firies said it was nothing compared to Ash Wednesday or the Sydney fires - if our 'little' fire seemed so huge in real life I can't imagine how big those fires were, as huge as they looked on TV.
The other day I was talking to my boss about the fire here and he told me he was in the CFS during Ash Wednesday... he said that he watched a whole hill explode into flames in less than a minute, how he'd watched houses literally explode and burn to the ground in only a couple of minutes.
I think that people overseas don't understand the ferociousness of bush fires... these fires become so intense that they turn into storms... they generate ferocious winds of cyclonic/hurricane strength as they suck up oxygen, which further fuels them out of control and sends smoke and embers kilometers into the air. Embers fall back to earth kilometers away, sparking other fires as they touch the tinder-dry bush. When I say storms I mean storms... it's like being plunged into the depths of hell where there's fire everywhere and as well as burning around you, it rains down from the sky. Flames reach 10's of metres into the air and rush forwards like a massive tidal wave. They say that they're so hot that trees explode into flames before the fire reaches them.
Yet for some reason people never learn the lessons. I feel so angry and sick to the stomach when I drive through the hills that were annihilated on Ash Wednesday and see houses with roofs covered with dead leaves and trees growing alongside and overhanging houses. Houses without sprinkler systems on their roofs... people disregarding simple things like clearing all vegetation for 20m from around your house and keeping gutters and roofs clean - things that I remember being drilled into me at primary school (which was, I admit, a few years after Ash Wednesday). These people behave like this then *expect* *volunteer* firefighters to put their lives on the line to save their houses when disaster strikes! How can people be so complacent?
Every year now the CFS warns us that we're facing a greater and greater risk of another Ash Wednesday because there's been no fires since and the fuel load is higher than ever - so high that it's suicide to do back burning - they just have to leave it now. It's only a matter of time before it happens again, yet people *still* don't keep their houses in shape!
I'm not religious, but God help us all should we have another Ash Wednesday.
As terrible and horrific as it's been, I really can't stand that people are labelling it the "worst ever". Not being from the eastern side of Australia probably has something to do with the way I feel about this (yes, people west of Qld, NSW and Vic feel like they're in a different, neglected country), but it seems that people are forgetting that *the* worst fires *ever* were Ash Wednesday in SA and Vic on February 16, 1983:
L AG/ASHWED83/AW83.HTM
m e/Transcripts/s678221.htm / FAAF080E6756F7904A25679300155B2B?OpenDocument e nts/nature/1983_ash%20wednesday%20bushfires.htm
2545 Buildings destroyed
75 People died
>390,000 Hectares burnt
source: http://sres.anu.edu.au/associated/fire/IUFRO/CONF
Don't get me wrong, the current predicament is terrible and serious, but please don't forget history or act like NSW is the only state that matters.
These are also some pages descibing that day:
http://www.abc.net.au/dimensions/dimensions_in_ti
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~gscfa/ash.htm
http://www.nre.vic.gov.au/4A25676D0022F2EE/BCView
http://www.historysmiths.com.au/CentFedPlayKit/ev
Google will help you find more.
The $5M spectrograph that was being built there (to go on the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii) was destroyed as well. This is a major loss for the Astronomical community. Very sad.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
According to this Spacedail article the databases of astronomical research have been salvaged, the team will keep building their instruments, probably on the main ANU campus and Stromlo will be rebuilt (though I'm guessing minus the telescopes).
I've written down some of my own memories of Mt Stromlo observatory.
What is the inverse of the Matrix?