Cafe Society: Act now to avoid a fire disaster

GREATER Hobart is going to look different if David Bowman realises his plan to make our city fire-safe.

Bushfire expert David Bowman outlines his plan for protecting the city from bushfires. Picture: SAM ROSEWARNE

“MY nightmare scenario is we don’t do anything,” says bushfire expert David Bowman, who is urging pre-emptive action if we are to avoid a disaster on the scale of the 1967 Tasmanian infernos, when 64 people died.

“We have to get used to the idea that the periphery of Greater Hobart is going to look different,” says the Professor of Pyrogeography at the University of Tasmania.

Thinning the forests of the city fringes is crucial, he says, particularly on the western side where fuel loads are the most dense and dangerous.

It’s a typically mild and slightly damp October morning when we meet at Smolt Kitchen near Bowman’s West Hobart home to talk about the fire centre the academic is setting up at the university.

It takes imagination to accept that we are sitting in a potentially extreme danger zone. It seems I’m falling into the trap of letting the weather beguile me into a false sense of security.

We need to understand Hobart’s risk profile as low consequence, high probability, says Bowman, likening our extreme days to rogue waves.

“Without wanting to alarm people, you probably couldn’t have put a capital city in a worse place,” he says, referring partly to the intense, super-dry northerly wind to which Hobart is prone on the worst of days.

“The probability of extreme fire weather days is quite low relative to the mainland, but the fuel loads are so heavy and the landscape so combustible [with load density, species type and hilly terrain] that, when you get it, you get some of the most intense fires on earth.

“And what climate change is doing is increasing probability by a country mile.”

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It was incredible no one died in the intense bushfires on the Tasman and Forestier peninsulas in 2013, he says.

“But country was being so kind to us and giving us a warning: this is what it can look like. If the Dunalley fire happens in Hobart, it’s not going to be good.”

Bowman has seen firsthand the devastation wrought by recent global fire disasters including in Alberta, Canada, where the damage bill hit
$9.9 billion over 5900sq km of destruction; the Chilean fires last year, which destroyed 1800sq km; and the Californian disasters, which destroyed 5180 sq km this year. The horror of Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires in February 2009, which killed 173, still haunts him.

Next month he has been invited to study the sites of the deadly Spain

and Portugal blazes of last October, also paying heed to the conditions that led to the fatal Greece fires killing 91 in July. The changing Mediterranean fire profile is significant, he says.

“These are horrifying events, massive, incredible, transformative things. And here in Hobart we are exposing ourselves to such an event.”

Bowman’s work is not about response capabilities, which is the realm of the state emergency services, but understanding landscape, identifying risk constellations and developing ideas for adaptive response.

If we are going to get a grip on the global fire management crisis, we need to approach it holistically, he says.

“Pyrogeography involves many academic disciplines and ways of thinking [beyond science], from the law to anthropology, sociology and psychology.”

He is bringing the elements together to form a global network run from the new fire centre at UTAS. The centre is also building networks between local scientists, councils, the Tasmania Fire Service, National Parks, non-government organisations and farmers.

Several projects are under way, including the development of a new fire-tracking app and an online seminar series on bushfire awareness.

LET’S take an imaginary walk at nearby Knocklofty Reserve, I suggest. Paint me a picture of how it would change to fit his fire-ready ideal.

It would resemble the open landscape portrayed in John Glover paintings of the 1830s rather than the bushy regrowth of today, he says.

“We are going to open up areas of the bush, make green fire breaks, not bulldozing a strip but [removing some trees and using low-intensity burn-offs to] create parklands.

”Beautiful habitat mosaics will include more marsupial lawns, where we want our little helpers to eat the grass.”

The plan will draw on traditional fire management techniques from Aboriginal and Mediterranean cultures, both civilisations having long co-existed with flammable landscapes.

“Then we can start melding those and redesigning our landscapes to be biodiverse and beautiful as well as fire-safe.

“Then, in other areas of the perimeter all the way down to the Channel, we can use vineyards and olive groves and agriculture as part of the buffer zone.”

Bowman is excited by the possibility of Hobart becoming “a gigantic real-time fire intervention”.

“The fantastic thing about applied science is you can start trying to solve the world’s problems and a great place to start is the backyard.

“It’s all about community engagement and waking people up, not terrifying them.”