Aussie forest fires...

correct me if im wrong but these forest fires were/are inevitable right ?

due to the very dry summer any spark might have caused it.
It's easy to blame arsonists but the fires might have happened anyway due to the dry bush, but i'm no expert.

yep, you're spot on. some fires were deliberately lit, but definitely not all of them.

also, if i lived in the suburbs of melbourne i would now be thinking of creating a hole in the ground shelter with a ready supply of oxygen.
Seems like there was no other way of avoiding the fire for those poor victims.

the suburbs are pretty safe, it's usually the fringes of the city where people live on a few acres, hobby farms and stuff, where there are fires close to Melbourne. In this case, most of the fires are in the country. the closest ones to Melbourne are probably Healesville, which isn't really a suburb of Melbourne (although you could commute to the city from there). I've been staying with my mum in Mt Waverley (south-eastern suburbia) and until yesterday you wouldn't have known there were fires. Then the wind changed and the sky was full of smoke. Mt Dandenong often has bushfires, and I guess places like Belgrave and Emerald might be called suburbs, but they're also not typical of Melbourne's suburban landscape.

i still can't understand how these fires covered so much ground so quickly. the radio this morning people had minutes to get out. but at the same time they spoke of how the smoke in the sky blocked the sun.
If the wind was that strong you would see the smoke a long long time before the flames? Is the area pretty flat??

which area? the fires are/were covering a massive area across the state, it wasn't localised. most of the areas that burned aren't flat though, they are on hills and ridges in forested areas. very pretty. people knew there was a fire in the area, but not that it was coming that fast or was that intense - they had very little warning because the fires were burning through phone and electricity lines and moving so much faster than normal. it takes time for radio warnings to filter through. and then even if you can see smoke, you don't necessarily know where the actual firefront is until you see it, by which time it's pretty much too late when the fire is that intense. there is much discussion at the moment about building a better early-warning system.

as teenslain said, the fire moved so quickly because the wind was so strong, and the vegetation was incredibly dry and has evolved to burn (flammable oils in eucalypt trees). it was 46 degrees in Melbourne that day, and hotter in some rural areas. the previous week we had consecutive days of 43, 44 and 45 degrees which really dried everything out. basically it was like a giant tinderbox sitting in an enormous bellows. it's difficult to explain just how mental the weather was on the day it all kicked off. 46 degrees! with 100km/h winds! it just doesn't describe what it felt like... which was like standing in a hairdryer. think about how many old people die in britain when a "heatwave" of 30-32 degrees hits! 46 degrees!! hot 100km/h winds that have blown across 3000km of baking desert! Hellish!

Also, ordinarily the CFA advises people that if they have a fire plan and are properly prepared with fire hoses and pumps etc (most people are because bushfires are not that uncommon) they can stay and defend their houses. in this case the fire was just too fast and massive and people got trapped in their houses, or in their cars while they tried to escape at the last minute.

pretty fucking horrible.