"By then, emergency management officials at all levels of government were planning for the worst.The ABC can reveal extensive preparations were made to evacuate thousands of residents from Sydney's Hornsby and Hills districts.Evacuation centres and escape routes were mapped out.If the fire had broken through, it would have triggered one of Australia's biggest peacetime evacuations.Shopping centres and RSL clubs in the Hornsby area were on standby to be used as refuges. Have they fallen out? The first product would not charge and the other one did not work at all. "No matter where you are ... everybody has to assume the worst," the Premier warned.By that morning, Gospers Mountain had doubled in size again to almost 25,000ha, threatening homes in the small, isolated village of Mellong.Driven by fearsome winds, the fire made another astonishing run — covering 11.7km in under three hours.Superintendent Hodges calls it one of the worst days she's ever seen.As the fire closed in on Mellong, it developed its own weather system.That happens when superheated air rising in the smoke plume rapidly expands and cools, eventually generating its own thunderstorm.The phenomena is called a pyrocumulonimbus, or "pyro", cloud.Firefighters describe it as a "black swan" event — named for its rarity.Local weather stations did not record any lightning from the pyro cloud, but RFS volunteers witnessed strikes starting spot fires to the east. Something? I also purchased tried purchasing the Alta twice and had to take it back both times. "Nothing we did stopped it. "Backburns create containment lines by robbing a bushfire of fuel, but they require careful planning and favourable winds.The RFS used them successfully throughout the Gospers Mountain campaign.At about 6:00pm on December 3, Mr Burley received a strange call.His crews were racing to complete backburns along two established hiking trails to protect homes at Colo Heights, about 40km from Sydney's north-western outskirtsBut the operation had to be suspended when one of his firefighters found an empty car.The teams feared whoever left the car would become trapped between the backburn and the fire front. Over a million hectares burned; a hundred homes destroyed on Sydney's doorstep.Gospers Mountain became famous as Australia's first "mega-blaze".But behind the smoke, flames and evacuations, there is still much to learn about the monster.The ABC has pieced together data, imagery and interviews to form a new narrative of the fire.The NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) and National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) contributed information and access to operational commanders, some speaking for the first time.We can reveal the fire's starting point, and how close Sydney's suburbs came to disaster.Firefighters tell of raised hopes as the flames faltered, and despair as backburns backfired.Australia's largest bushfire almost never happened.In late October 2019, a violent storm swept across NSW.By the time it reached the Wollemi National Park north of Sydney, it had almost fizzled out.In all, the storm unleashed just under 19,100 bolts of lightning.The ABC has analysed every strike using meteorological data, cross-referenced with records from weather stations across NSW.We found the lightning that started the mega-blaze was an outlier.At 10:55am on October 26, strike number 19,068, lasting just 518 milliseconds, fell on the eastern edge of the dying storm.That lightning bolt hit a stringybark tree deep in the park at Running Stream, 15 kilometres from the nearest road.NPWS dispatched a helicopter with a Remote Area Firefighting Team (RAFT), but strong winds stopped them winching down.Months later, a helicopter is still the only way to reach the ignition point.An ABC team landed at a makeshift helipad, hewn from the bush by another RAFT team.Police had been there just days earlier, felling stringybarks to take forensic samples for a coronial inquiry.Today that tree seems almost insignificant — another charred trunk in a devastated forest.

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