And the flames went higher in a spring of fire

Australians need to better prepare as the likelihood of outbreaks increases.

Firefighters and police watch as flames approach Peregian Beach on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. Picture: John McCutcheon / Sunshine Coast Daily

When fire danced across the Noosa National Park treetops ­towards Peregian Beach on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, it was almost as if Australians looked towards their calendars with a uniform sense of disbelief and anxiety.

September? Noosa?

With hundreds of residents and their homes under threat, the Sunshine Coast story has been replicated in dozens of postcodes in Queensland and NSW as climate, relentless complacency and mischief continue to trouble firefighters.

For southeast Queensland, it wasn’t an especially early start to the fire danger season, according to experts, but it was the intensity of the fires that caused the greatest alarm.

It’s one thing for fires to start in early spring, quite another to reach the point where large-scale loss of life is a possibility.

Lessons of Black Saturday

What is concerning the experts is the extent to which many have yet to learn the lessons of the Black Saturday fire disaster 10 years ago, when 173 people died and more than 2000 houses were torched in Victoria.

Particularly on the question of arson.

The Bushfire and Natural Hazards Co-operative Research Centre was set up after Black Saturday, and its Australian outlook for ­last month, released last week, neatly foreshadowed what was coming.

Its chief executive, Richard Thornton, warns there is significant research worldwide that fire seasons are starting earlier and generally getting longer.

Thornton wants Australians in danger areas to start seriously looking at their fire safety plans, including what they want to take with them when they leave well ahead of any blaze.

He says climate may not necessarily be the match that lights the fire but it helps create the conditions that mean bushfires can occur more often, in more places.

“It changes the frequency, I guess, between major fire events,” he tells The Australian.

“Looking at the extremes, we are going to see higher temperatures and higher fire danger days.”

According to the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, Australia is staring at a difficult fire season following above-average temperatures and the severe drought that is gripping large parts of the ­country.

Water bombing near Peregian Beach. Picture: Lachie Millard

Flaming politicians

Fire is like politics. Everything is local.

Just because a drought is gripping an area, it doesn’t automatically follow that there will be an extreme fire risk.

It will depend on fuel loads, weather events and whether there is an ignition point, which quite often is a man or child.

The Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC report is developed by multiple agencies, including fire authorities across Australia and the Bureau of Meteorology.

Its warnings are clear: “Sea­sonal fire conditions are a function of fuel amount and state, and seasonal weather conditions.

“The year to date has been unusually warm and dry for large parts of Australia.

“For January to July, rainfall has been below to very much below average over much of Australia. It has been the fifth-­driest start to the year on record and the driest since 1970. The warming trend means that above-average temperatures now tend to occur in most years, and 2019 has followed this pattern.”

Perfect storm

The effect of this is that Australia is entering another particularly dangerous and unpredictable fire season that will be fought in some areas, particularly parts of NSW, where water will be scarce and there will be a build-up of increasingly dry fuel.

The climate outlook in the run-up to summer will be influenced by the Indian Ocean, and the outlook for spring maximum temperatures is for above-average daytime readings for most of Australia.

The perfect storm comes when a freak weather event, such as Black Saturday, combines with an ignition point such as a fallen powerline or arson. One of the lessons of bushfire history in Australia is that fire often, but not always, follows a familiar path.

Kinglake, in Victoria’s range country, was smashed in 2009 but also experienced other serious fires.

David Bowman, a University of Tasmania professor of pyrogeography, says he is horrified about what may happen to ­Hobart and its surrounds one day if a bushfire were to take control.

Tasmania, including the ­Hobart district, was devastated in 1967 when 62 people died, 900 were injured and more than 7000 were left homeless in a horrific series of fires.

Golfers on the green next to a bushfire-damaged area in Peregian Springs. Picture: AAP

Climate

Bowman has warned that changing climate conditions have the potential to wreak havoc on the community.

“This thing is not going to go away,” he tells The Australian. “It’s just going to keep, like a vice-like grip, closing in on us.”

Bowman says the fire season that has started so early in Australia is an extreme climate event that has implications for many areas.

“It’s a fact that you are seeing the conjunction of a fire season with an extreme drought and ­extreme winds. So basically you are seeing an extreme climate event,” he says.

“That’s just reality. It’s what it is. It’s an extreme climate event. Fundamentally, we’ve got to a point as fire scientists that we have to be honest and make the ­diagnosis that this is a climate change event.

“And the reason that we would make that diagnosis is not simply relying on one database or one strand of evidence but a constellation of evidence.”

For the political classes, fire is a weapon. Greens leader Richard Di ­Natale predictably seized on the Queensland and NSW fires, ­declaring Australia was in a climate emergency.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson reckons the senator is an “absolute idiot”.

Labor savaged Water Res­ources, Drought, Rural Finance, Natural Disaster and Emergency Management Minister David Littleproud for stating he was ­unsure if human activity was ­behind climate change.

Littleproud told Sky News a changing climate was ­behind the fires but was unsure whether human activity was ­responsible. “I’m not a scientist, I haven’t made an opinion one way or another,” he said. “I don’t have an opinion but I don’t think it really matters.”

The royal commission that looked into Black Saturday was, like the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC outlook report, accurate in its observations.

“It will be many years before its effects dim. Governments, fire and emergency services agencies and all individuals can learn valuable lessons from those days, so that we might reduce the risk of such destruction occurring again,” it found. “It would be a mistake to treat Black Saturday as a ‘one-off’ event. With populations at the rural- urban interface growing and the impact of climate change, the risks associated with bushfire are likely to increase.”

This observation, made following Australia’s worst bushfire disaster, is as valid today as when it was made.

Firefighters have taken some solace from the fact no one has died during the present bushfire emergency. Indeed, it has been the effects of significantly better warning systems, stricter planning controls and millions spent on better educating the community that has helped reduce the death toll in subsequent fires.

However, fire officials have ­lamented what they describe as ­increasing complacency among many people living in high-fire-risk areas. Part of this is to do with the churn of residents in high-fire-risk areas.

 

Families moving in

Those districts severely affected by the Black Saturday disaster, for ­example, have witnessed thousands of new families moving into the high-risk areas while those ­battered and bruised survivors moved out.

Higher city-based property ­prices have contributed to hundreds of thousands of people quitting urban life, only to expose themselves and their families to the risk of bushfire seasons, which we know are getting longer and more hazardous.

No one is suggesting the ­answers to the fire risk are black and white, or that climate variability is the only threat facing the community. But weather has an inevitable impact on fire conditions, a point that not even the most strident anti-climate change activists is likely to disagree with.

The Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC agrees, in its advice to fire agencies, that multiple factors contribute to fire risk.

“Bushfire potential depends on many factors,” it says. “The volume, location and timing of rainfall are critically important when estimating vegetation (fuel) volumes and growth. The climate outlook for the next few months is also a crucial factor.”

Arsonists

Equally crucial is the ability of police and the community to limit the number of man-made fires, with the Queensland Police Service admitting that many of the most recent fires may have been deliberately lit.

This underpins the challenges facing firefighters and the need for the states to ensure that hazard-­reduction burn targets are met.

But the challenges facing Queensland and NSW are ­probably best exemplified by Queensland Acting Premier Jackie Trad, who said the fire services already had issued many hundreds of bushfire community warnings.

“To put this into context, last year’s fire season … the two weeks that we saw quite an intense level of activity in central Queensland — where we did have to evacuate the whole township of Gracemere — some 540 community warnings were issued during that two-week period,” Trad said.

“We have seen some 519 bushfire community warnings issued in the past eight days.

“So that gives you a sense of what our firefighters and our Queensland police frontline service workers have been facing over the last eight days.”

And it’s only September 12.