megafire

A megafire, also called a megablaze, is a fire which has grown to such huge proportions and covers such a vast area of land that to confine or contain it is no longer possible. Instead firefighters concentrate on saving lives and property.  This word is very new. The website Wildfire Today claims to have coined it in 2015 and to have defined it as a fire exceeding 100 000 acres  (41,000 hectares). It was possibly in the jargon of geographers, firefighters and climate change scientists but it is now a word that we all know, especially Sydneysiders who have had one the size of Sydney parked on their doorstep for weeks.

 Wildfire Today also said that they had in mind the possibility of a gigafire, that is, a fire reaching 1 million acres (500 000 hectares). In 2018 a bushfire near Broome burned out roughly twice this area so it was a double gigafire.

 There is a tendency in Australia to spell the term mega fire, as the adjectival use of mega is now so common that regarding mega as an adjective is more appealing than using it as a suffix.