Prepare for bushfires with heavy fuel loads, El Nino

After a drenching summer giving way to a wet autumn so far, it is clear that come next summer the fuel load along the nation’s east coast could heighten the risk of serious bushfires. For that reason the warning by new NSW Emergency Services Minister Jihad Dib that unacceptable delays to the implementation of the independent inquiry into the Black Summer infernos has left the state dangerously unprepared need to be taken seriously.

Recommendations of the expert inquiry set up after the deadly bushfires over the 2019-20 summer, in which 26 people died and 2500 homes were destroyed, need to be implemented.

The inquiry, led by former chief scientist Mary O’Kane and former deputy police commissioner Dave Owens, found underlying structural problems across emergency services undermined efforts to combat the hazardous fires.

As NSW political correspondent Max Maddison reports, The Australian’s analysis of the inquiry’s first progress report in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the most recent update, in the third quarter of 2022, found 35 per cent of recommendations or sub-recommendations had seen target dates pushed back, with more than 20 per cent not completed.

Of 148 recommendations, 8 per cent have been delayed past the point of the approaching bushfire season. Emergency services experts believe the 2023-24 summer is likely to be particularly dangerous, given the forecast swing to warmer, drier El Nino conditions after three years of above-average rainfall.

On a continent in which the ravages of summer bushfires have been documented since the mid-19th century, governments in recent years have a poor track record in responding to expert reports after devastating fire seasons.

In 2021, 12 years after Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires, we reported that the Andrews government was failing to build new community fire refuges in defiance of the Black Saturday royal commission.

It was relying instead on ­ open ­spaces such as sporting ovals for use as a last resort in the event of a bushfire in some of the world’s most at-risk fire regions.

About 50 towns in Victoria were listed among the world’s most dangerous fire locations, including the Dandenongs in Melbourne’s outer east and a series of Great Ocean Road towns that ­adjoin the Otway Ranges that were burnt during the 1983 Ash Wednesday disaster. And in 2015 one of Australia’s leading fire ­experts, former CSIRO bushfire scientist David Packham, called for at least a doubling of controlled burns in states such as Victoria, warning lack of intervention was creating dangerous fuel loads.

In NSW, one of the important uncompleted recommendations from the expert report includes rolling out mobile data terminals into firefighting vehicles to improve delivery of incident information/intelligence to field commanders.

The initial implementation date has been pushed back from the middle of this year to 2025. Mr Dib was taking the most responsible approach when he said he would use departmental briefings to see whether delivery of recommen­dations could be sped up.

“This wet season has accelerated the risk of grass fires (and) created more fuel for a future bushfire season, which means any delay to these recommendations does not put NSW in the best possible ­position to confront bushfires or to save lives and property,’’ Mr Dib told The Australian.

In early 2021 the NSW Audit Office criticised the way emergency response agencies – including the NSW Rural Fire Service, the NSW State Emergency Service and Resilience NSW, now the NSW Reconstruction Authority – had addressed accepted recommendations from 17 public inquiries into fire disasters across the past decade. Come summer, citizens living and travelling in potential fire zones deserve to be reassured that every reasonable precaution to prevent and deal with potential fire disasters has been taken.