1939 жылғы Австралиядағы алапат өрттер

Series of bushfires in Australia in 1939

The Black Friday bushfires of 13 January 1939, in Victoria, Australia, were part of the devastating 1938–1939 bushfire season in Australia, which saw bushfires burning for the whole summer, and ash falling as far away as New Zealand. It was calculated that three quarters of the State of Victoria was directly or indirectly affected by the disaster, while other Australian states and the Australian Capital Territory were also badly hit by fires and extreme heat. This was the third deadliest bushfire event in Australian history, only behind the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires and the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. Fires burned almost of land in Victoria, where 71 people were killed, and several towns were entirely obliterated. Over 1,300 homes and 69 sawmills were burned, and 3,700 buildings were destroyed or damaged. New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory also faced severe fires during the 1939 season. Destructive fires burned from the NSW South Coast, across the ranges and inland to , while Sydney was ringed by fires which entered the outer suburbs, and fires raged towards the new capital at Canberra. South Australia was also struck by the Adelaide Hills bushfires.

Eastern Australia is one of the most fire prone regions of the world, with predominant eucalypt forests that have evolved to thrive on the phenomenon of bushfire. However, the 1938 9 bushfire season was exacerbated by a period of extreme heat, following several years of drought. Extreme heatwaves were accompanied by strong northerly winds, after a very dry six months. In the days preceding the fires, the Victorian state capital, Melbourne, experienced some of its hottest temperatures on record at the time: on 8 January and on 10 January. On 13 January, the day of the fires, temperatures reached , which stood as the hottest day officially recorded in Melbourne for the next 70 years. (Unofficial records show temperatures of around were reported on the Black Thursday fires of 6 February 1851). The subsequent Victorian Royal Commission investigation of the fires recorded that Victoria had not seen such dry conditions for more than two decades, and its rich plains lay "bare and baking; and the forest, from the foothills to the alpine heights, were tinder". The people who made their lives in the bush were worried by the dry conditions, but "had not lived long enough" to imagine what was to come: " the most disastrous forest calamity the State of Victoria has known." Fires had been burning separately across Victoria through December, but reached a new intensity and "joined forces in a terrible confluence of flame ".

The subsequent Royal Commission, under Judge Leonard Edward Bishop Stretton (known as the Stretton Inquiry), attributed blame for the fires to careless burning, campfires, graziers, sawmillers and land clearing. Prior to 13 January 1939, many fires were already burning. Some of the fires started as early as December 1938, but most of them started in the first week of January 1939. Some of these fires could not be extinguished. Others were left unattended or, as Judge Stretton wrote, the fires were allowed to burn "under control", as it was falsely and dangerously called. Stretton declared that most of the fires were lit by the "hand of man". As a consequence of Judge Stretton's scathing report, the Forests Commission Victoria gained additional funding and took responsibility for fire protection on all public land including State forests, unoccupied Crown Lands and National Parks, plus a buffer extending one mile beyond their boundaries on to private land. Its responsibilities grew in one leap from Stretton's recommendations officially sanctioned and encouraged the common bush practice of controlled burning to minimise future risks. to ground observers. Victoria's forests were devastated to an extent that was unprecedented within living memory, and the impact of the 1939 bushfires dominated management thought and action for much of the next ten years. Salvage of fire killed timber became an urgent and dominant task that was still consuming the resources and efforts of the Forests Commission a decade and a half later. It was estimated that over 6 million cubic meters of timber needed to be salvaged. This massive task was made more difficult by labour shortages caused by the Second World War. In fact, there was so much material that some of the logs were harvested and stockpiled in huge dumps in creek beds and covered with soil and treeferns to stop them from cracking, only to be recovered many years later. On 16 January, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that disastrous fires were burning in Victoria, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory as the climax to the terrible heatwave: Sydney faced record heat and was ringed to the north, south and west by bushfires from Palm Beach and Port Hacking to the Blue Mountains, with fires blazing at Castle Hill, Sylvania, Cronulla and French's Forest.

Internationally, south eastern Australia is considered one of the three most fire prone landscapes on Earth, along with southern California and the southern Mediterranean. Major Victorian bushfires occurred on Black Thursday in 1851, where an estimated were burnt, followed by another blaze on Red Tuesday in February 1891 in South Gippsland when about were burnt, 12 people died and more than 2,000 buildings were destroyed. The deadly pattern continued with more major fires on Black Sunday on 14 February 1926 sees the tally rise to sixty lives being lost and widespread damage to farms, homes and forests. Considered in terms of both loss of property and loss of life the 1939 fires were one of the worst disasters, and certainly the worst bushfire event, to have occurred in Australia up to that time. Only the subsequent Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1983 and the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 resulted in more deaths. In terms of the total area burnt, the 1974–75 fires burned , equivalent to 15% of Australia's land. ; the Black Friday fires burned up , with the Black Thursday fires of 1851 having burnt an estimated .