Australia in the line of fire and it’s not over
When the smoke has literally and figuratively cleared, Australia must reckon with what the experts assure us is a new reality: longer fire seasons and hotter, drier climates.
If Australians needed further convincing the fires ravaging the east coast this year are different than those that had gone before, the sight of exhausted holidaymakers being evacuated from the pier at Mallacoota into the bowels of HMAS Choules should do it.
Days earlier those same people huddled under blood-red skies as firefighters fought house to house and throughout the night to save the Victorian town from the monster fire front that tore a deadly path through East Gippsland.
On the NSW south coast, similar battles were fought — some won, many lost.
The historic town of Cobargo is all but gone. About 100km to the north, the community of Lake Conjola surrendered 89 homes while at nearby Sussex Inlet authorities pulled the charred remains of a fire victim from the burnt wreck of a car earlier this week.
Malua Bay, 300km south of Sydney, looked like it had been bombed, with smoke billowing in from the fire-stricken hinterland and terrified residents huddled on the beach like refugees.
In dozens of coastal towns, fresh food and water have been in short supply. Power outages have crippled communications networks.
Locals and holidaymakers lucky enough to get out were forced to endure two-hour queues at petrol stations.
At the end of a hellish week — and with the threat of worse to come — 10 Australians are dead, although it’s feared that number could rise, with 28 people still unaccounted for in Victoria alone.
Hundreds of homes lie in ashened ruins; by the end of this summer, several million hectares of bushland will have been razed, with fires continuing to burn in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia.
On Friday HMAS Choules began the mass evacuation of the 1000 or so people pinned to the coast by the unrelenting fires stoked by another day of soaring temperatures, high winds and low humidity.
Tens of thousands of people are expected to pour out of East Gippsland over coming days — be it by car or boat or whatever other means available — with authorities warning that the worst could still be to come.
The military-led evacuations — hitherto unthinkable — could be relied upon by isolated coastal communities for the next few days, and may now be a new blueprint for how best to mitigate the loss of life in such areas. Scott Morrison has flagged an inquiry into land management and fire mitigation, but for now it will have to wait. There is so much of the country left to burn.
The extreme drought that has sucked the moisture from the landscape has left an ominous mountain of fuel across the nation’s floor, with fresh fire fronts a matter of when not if.
It is going to be a long summer.
But when it is done, and the smoke has literally and figuratively cleared, Australia must reckon with what the experts assure us is a new reality: longer fire seasons and hotter, drier climates. To meet this new challenge Australia will need to rethink the way it manages the landscape, how and where it builds its cities and how it configures a volunteer workforce that in the future will be required to work harder, longer and under more arduous conditions.
“Fire management spans a huge range of facets, from education campaigns, suppression, preventive measures, such as prescribed burning, development control, development standard and evacuation processes,’’ University of Wollongong’s director of bushfire risk management, Ross Bradstock, tells Inquirer. “All these things contribute.’’
None of this sits easily in a national debate already preoccupied with blame, partisanship and a surfeit of ideology. The Prime Minster has been excoriated for his slow response to the disaster, but the indications are he at least understands the complexity of the task ahead, noting the extreme drought had created a “quite extraordinary’’ fire season.
He cited “a need to address issues around hazard reduction in national parks, dealing with land-clearing laws, zoning laws and planning laws around people’s properties and where they can be built in countries like Australia, up and down our coast”.
“There have been many restrictions put around those issues that now I think would have to be reviewed on the basis of the impact of the broader climatic effects we are seeing in this country,” Morrison said.
Hazard reduction has been the subject of fierce debate across Australia for years, but the contentious issue mostly falls to state governments and local councils, so to a certain extent the hands of the federal government are presently tied.
Former NSW fire chief Greg Mullins says that as fire seasons become longer the window in which fuel loads can be safely dealt with through hazard reduction shrinks. That will require more reliance on paid professionals, who can burn seven days a week, rather than volunteers.
“The big thing is to have a hard look at how the federal government provides support for states and territories,’’ Mullins says. “They need to look at national approaches to fuel reduction, building standards and planning standards for communities.’’
Then there is climate change.
The debate around bushfires and climate change is at a strange juncture, one where the cause of the problem and its solution bear little practical relationship to one another.
The scientific consensus could not be clearer: anthropogenic warming has worsened Australia’s fire risk by extending fire seasons, increasing average temperature and drying the landscape. And yet addressing this reality by reducing emissions will offer little practical help to Australians who must gird themselves against the threat of more fires, at least not for the foreseeable future.
“We’ve already locked in climate change,’’ says Bradstock. “Any future action in terms of emissions reduction is about stopping it getting worse.
“We have to think about emissions reductions, but we also have to think about adaptation — adaptation with a capital A.’’
Like virtually all experts, Bradstock says the acute cause of this season’s fires has been the combination of extreme drought and “unrelenting’’ fire weather — an unusually long succession of hot, dry days. Lighting strikes and arsonists have ignited huge fuel loads creating intense fires, which have been spread far and wide by gusting winds.
“We’re in territory I’ve never seen before,’’ Bradstock says. “We’re potentially going to have to do five times the amount of prescribed burning just to keep the risk where it was early in the 21st century. The season we’re seeing now is the sort of season that was projected to hit in the 2050s. Many people are worried that the climate change projections are playing out faster than we thought.’’
University of Tasmania fire expert David Bowman says climate change has accelerated the fire hazard, but warns the conditions for catastrophic fires have always been there.
“All of these problems already existed. All climate change is doing is accelerating them and amplifying them,’’ he says.
Bowman says one of the solutions will be to reimagine the way we build and manage the urban-bush interface, the point of contact between our cities and the landscape.
Instead of managing our risk in the bush, we must think backwards.
“The old idea is that you would work from the bush into the settlement,’’ he says.
“But the scale of the thing means that’s not credible.
“The scale of fuel breaks and fire suppression across huge areas, it’s going to cost a fortune.’’
Former NSW Rural Fire Service boss Phil Koperberg agrees.
“We’ve got to stop squeezing every square metre of developable land near the bush,’’ he says. “We need to be more disciplined. Instead of going out we might need to go up.’’
Bradstock says what is needed is a root-and-branch inquiry — preferably a royal commission — into the causes of these fires, and what governments and communities can do to manage them in the future. He says the fires have exposed a national problem that requires a national solution.
Asked to nominate the areas most likely in need of reform, Bradstock cites the professionalism of the response.
While no one, Bradstock included, doubts the courage, commitment and doggedness of the volunteers that have faced down this year’s fires, the scale of future challenges may prove beyond the ageing pool of volunteer firefighters.
Bradstock cautions against assuming the fires we have seen are once-in-a-decade events.
He says after five years most forested areas will produce enough fuel loads to feed catastrophic fires, provided the weather conditions are right.
“If we were to have another drought of this magnitude in five or six years’ time, it’s game on again,’’ he says. “We may have to go to a much greater level of professionalism.
“Volunteers will always be there but we may need to go to a professional workforce to manage future crises.”
The sheer scale of this season’s fires is hard to comprehend, with the area of bushland already burnt being larger than many small European countries.
Koperberg says the size and the behaviour of these fires are unlike any in his lifetime.
“For the first time in living memory we have fire across a far broader landscape than ever before,’’ he tells Inquirer. “Fire seasons are normally migratory — they normally migrate from the north to the south — now they’re here all at once.’’
In Victoria, Country Fire Authority chief fire officer Steve Warrington says 3.5 per cent of Victoria has already been hit with fire this season, but warns relief could be weeks away.
“This is not over,” he says.