May you live in interesting times.
There was no name for the thing Tom Bates captured on video at the height of the notorious Australian bush fire season of 2002-2003. Prior to that sweltering afternoon, there was no such thing as “pyro-tornadogenesis,” because such a phenomenon—a tornado generated by a wildfire—was not known to occur on planet Earth. Wildfires in both hemispheres often whip up small twisters known as fire whirls, but as impressive as they are to behold, and as dangerous as they are to be near, they are relatively small and short-lived events—more like dust devils than full-blown cyclones. What Bates saw and filmed from a suburban rugby pitch just outside Canberra, in southeast Australia, was different. It occurred during a historic week of lightning-caused fires that killed 4 people, injured more than 400, and destroyed 500 homes west of Australia’s capital city.
On January 18, Bates and his neighbors in the Kambah neighborhood, about five miles southwest of downtown, were on high alert because local fires had advanced to within a mile and a half of their neighborhood. Looking northward that afternoon, toward the flames, Bates observed a large funnel cloud over Mount Arawang, one of several low, tree-covered peaks in the area that are laced with walking trails and surrounded by suburban homes.
Tornadoes are not unheard of in the region, but this one appeared to be rising up out of the fire itself, like an atmospheric Balrog. It was 4 in the afternoon, the ambient temperature was nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the air was so dark with smoke that it appeared to be nighttime. The year 2003 was before smartphones became widespread, but Bates had the presence of mind to get his video camera and record what would come to be a new kind of fire. “I’ve never in my life seen anything like it,” we hear Bates say as the funnel takes shape above the burning mountain. He struggles to describe what he is seeing, not because he lacks the words, but because no Earthling has ever witnessed what he is witnessing now: “Holy shit… Holy mackerel. It’s a big fireball. It’s gotta be rippin’ poor bastards’ houses up there.” Then, right before our eyes, Mount Arawang appears to detonate. The blinding flash, combined with the funnel cloud whirling above it, gives the impression of a nuclear blast. “Holy Jeezus,” Bates gasps. “This is bad news. It’s like a big fireball tornado.”
It is now clear that this monstrous thing, which Bates has just named, is headed directly toward him. Australians seem to have a gift for understatement, and, as the wind begins to hiss and roar through the camera mic, we hear Bates say, “This is rather frightening.” A moment later, tin roofing and other debris from the homes surrounding Mount Arawang begin clattering to earth all around him. Sticks and gravel are now flying in horizontal gusts. “I’m getting pelted with stuff. It’s stinging the daylights out of me,” he says, shortly before the video ends. “It’s just like being sandblasted.”
It was estimated later that, during the single blinding burst that caused Mount Arawang to briefly disappear, an area of roughly 300 acres ignited in less than a tenth of a second. Bates had managed to document the most dramatic instance of exterior flashover ever observed. The Canberra fire tornado of 2003 was rated an EF3 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, with horizontal winds of 160 miles per hour, roughly equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane. As the first documented example of its kind, it was a milestone—another harbinger of 21st-century fire. But the Chisholm Fire, two years earlier in Alberta, Canada, had offered a preview. A funnel cloud was observed during that fire as well, and the resulting forest damage showed evidence of cyclonic action.
It took years of analysis for Australian fire experts to fully understand what Bates and his neighbors witnessed on that terrible January day. The term “pyro-tornadogenesis” did not enter the literature until nearly a decade after the event. A fire tornado, fire scientists would come to understand, is the delinquent offspring of a pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorm. While you can have a pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorm without a fire tornado, you cannot have a fire tornado without a pyrocumulonimbus. In this sense, a fire tornado is—so far—a wildfire’s most dramatic terrestrial expression. (There are other extraordinary things that wildfires can do now, but they take place in the upper atmosphere.) Both fire tornadoes and pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorms are generated by high-intensity wildfires burning in hilly terrain on exceptionally hot days that have been further energized by incoming high-pressure systems and, some believe, by massive infusions of superheated steam from rapidly burning forests. These events have the capacity to further amplify an already ferocious fire in shocking ways that human beings have no power to defend against.