As the Blue Mountains sweated through its hottest and driest December on record, three strike teams of volunteer firefighters met at the turnoff to Mount Wilson on the Bells Line of Road. They were carrying drip torches – canisters with a handle on one side, a long narrow spout and a wick – for the purposes of starting a fire.
A lingering smoke carried the intimation of danger. The Gospers Mountain Fire had been building to the north for eight weeks, and by December 14, 2019, its perimeter had blown out to more than 1000 kilometres.
The Mount Wilson backburn escaped and burned through Berambing two days later.Credit: Nick Moir
The firefighters aimed to blacken the triangle of bush between the two roads, starting at the point and moving up the inside of each axis, as a last line of defence against the wildfire.
Mount Wilson Rural Fire Service (RFS) brigade captain Beth Raines, who was tasked with burning up the right axis towards Mount Wilson, offered a sardonic smile as she issued a final warning to the troops: “Make sure it doesn’t cross the road.”
Her local crew did not need to be told why. The rugged area on the other side of Mount Wilson Road had not been burned since the 1994 bushfires, and was piled with 25 years’ worth of fuel.
“That area was thicker than the hairs on a dog’s back,” one of the crew recalled. If fire got into that bushland, it was bound to run east towards the towns of Berambing, Mount Tomah and Bilpin.
But it was equally imperative that the fire did not leap over the left axis – the Bells Line of Road – which would be handled by two crews from the Hawkesbury. That way lay the Grose Valley, a huge, craggy wilderness that plunged down to the Grose River and then banked up towards the Great Western Highway, the most populous area of the Blue Mountains.
National Parks and Wildlife Services air attack supervisor Chris Banffy had noticed during his morning briefing that the weather bureau was foreshadowing south-westerly winds of up to 25 kilometres per hour in the afternoon, and told his pilots to be on high alert.
“The fuels and everything were off the Richter scale as far as dryness,” he would later tell a coronial inquiry. “Yes, it was conducive first thing in the morning to do the backburn, but even having the suggestion of the south-westerly on it, at any time of the day, was a red flag for me.”
By 2pm, Banffy could see from his helicopter that the two fires had met in the gully between the roads and were starting to flare. “At this point I thought we were going to lose it,” he said. “I did not see that we could hold it.”
In 2019, the Blue Mountains endured hottest and driest December on record.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
The wind had now swung to the south, the smoke had turned darker and Bell operations officer Craig Burley detected a noticeable drop in humidity. At 2.17pm, he ordered backburning to cease.
But the fire in the gully had woken up. The burn from the Bells Line of Road ran along a ridgeline and then bounded up a gully towards Mount Wilson Road, fanned by the south-westerly wind. One gust picked up an ember and carried it straight across the road, followed 25 minutes later by another, deeper into bush, where a new fire took hold. Then it roared towards Mount Wilson.
Four years after the Mount Wilson backburn, another bushfire season has arrived, the coronial inquiry just wrapped up and residents of the upper Blue Mountains are still asking what if anything was learned from the backburn’s disastrous escape. The fire went on to destroy 54,000 hectares, including properties in Bilpin, Mount Tomah, Berambing, Clarence, Dargan, Bell and Blackheath. And related to that question is a bigger one: what has been learned about fighting fire in the age of global warming?
Backburning – where a controlled burn is lit in the path of an impending bushfire to eliminate the fuel – remains the single most effective firefighting technique. But during the Black Summer, the RFS increasingly used the technique for a more strategic purpose, by lighting up around towns far from the fire front and blackening the entire area between them and the wildfire.
NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Rob Rogers said only 4 per cent of backburns escaped during the Black Summer.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
This more controversial approach has been quietly practised for years around communities close to national parks, to the concern of officers with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. But in a season that bushfires were burning through rainforests and bursting out of damp gullies where they might have been expected to extinguish, the RFS brought it to the forefront.
NSW RFS commissioner Rob Rogers says the strategies that the agency usually employed to contain bushfires did not work during the Black Summer, and the fires got to a point where the only way to stop them was by putting up a hard containment line. The season forced him to re-evaluate the worst-case scenario.
“I’ll see a fire and look at fuel in the landscape and think, ‘This is what it will do and this is what it won’t do’,” says Rogers. “Well, that had to be reset after 2019-20.”
The RFS aims to keep 80 per cent of fires to less than 10 hectares, and has invested in drone, satellite and thermal imaging technology to detect bushfires in remote country. But it would still struggle to stay on top of a season like 2019-20 when up to 200 fires were burning at once, Rogers says. Strategic backburning remains an option once they grow beyond a certain size.
“There are not many big fires that can be put out without backburns.”
But placing more fire in the landscape to counter the existing bushfire can backfire. The Mount Wilson fire was the sixth backburn to escape along the southern containment line that was intended to protect the upper Blue Mountains from the Gospers Mountain Fire. And others have argued for a more nuanced approach to backburning.
Three weeks earlier, the Rural Fire Service had floated a similar plan to the one executed south of the Gospers Mountain Fire with brigades in the Lower Hunter. Bushfire consultant and former RFS volunteer Tony Hawkins recalls a community meeting on November 24, 2019, where RFS employees announced their intention to run a 65-kilometre backburn north from St Albans to contain the north-eastern edge of the bushfire. He was aghast and made his concerns known.
“Nature doesn’t discriminate by ignition,” he posted the next day on the Wollombi community Facebook page. “Once the fire is lit, by what or whoever, that’s the fire and it carries all the same potential and danger as the main fire … Fires have grown to enormous sizes from unsuccessful backburns and my personal opinion is that if independent analysis was done, we would find that many of the 600 plus homes destroyed this season were lost due to these poor tactics.”
The RFS disputes that a backburn of any such length was proposed, and no such backburn was implemented. A few days later, lightning strikes to the west gave rise to six new bushfires and resources were directed towards them instead.
But he took no comfort when his concerns were vindicated by the outcome of the Mt Wilson backburn. His sister-in-law, who lived in Bilpin, lost a shed and most of the conservation area rainforest on her property and is still suffering the psychological effects.
“It was a disaster,” Hawkins says. “That backburn should never have happened.”
The Independent Bushfire Group – a coalition of experts in land management, firefighting and national parks – analysed 11 of the Black Summer fires to learn what strategies worked well and which did not, in an era where bushfires are likely to be bigger and more frequent. They concluded that some fires could have been contained earlier if there had been more emphasis on initial attack – but this required a bigger, dedicated rapid aerial attack force.
“The current mix of firefighting resources is truck dominated,” says group member Geoff Luscombe, who worked with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service for 30 years. “So road-based strategies, like long backburns, tend to be preferred. And that’s understandable. If you’ve got a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.”
Many of backburns conducted in 2019-20 were successful, Luscombe says, while others made the situation worse. But more research was needed to determine what factors made the difference, and it was difficult to tell what, if anything, the RFS had learned from its experience.
Its internal inquiry into the Mount Wilson backburn immediately after the Black Summer was never made public, though an interim report found it had been conducted appropriately. The senior volunteers who gave evidence to the coronial inquiry concluded that they would not have done anything differently if the same circumstances arose again.
“It’s essential to find out what factors made the difference so better decisions can be made in future fires,” Luscombe says.
The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, set up after the Black Summer, recommended that all states introduce mechanisms to promote a culture of continuous improvement, such as the inspector-generals of emergency services that exist in Queensland and Victoria.
This recommendation was endorsed by Jochen Spencer, who was caught in the backburn in 2019 and has been lobbying for an explanation into its origin and management ever since.
“An inspector general doing their own investigations just ramps up accountability,” Spencer says.
“Decisions are made that have absolutely disastrous consequences for the local community – whether it’s not to light a backburn, whether it’s to light one in bad conditions – and there needs to be more scrutiny around this.”
Bushfire survivor Jochen Spencer has been trying to get to the bottom of the Mount Wilson backburn for four years.Credit: Kate Geraghty
He points to the Victorian Inspector-General of Emergency Management’s 2015 finding that a bushfire in Lancefield was the result of a hazard reduction escape. The secretary of the Environment Department subsequently apologised to residents, and this went some way to restoring trust.
“We know it works, there’s a model for it, and it’s time NSW does the same thing,” Spencer says.
Rogers acknowledges that the RFS could be better at explaining its decisions and publishing the findings of its after-action reviews. But he is concerned that full transparency would inhibit people’s inclination to be frank and fearless.
“People use things to suit their particular agenda,” Rogers says. “That’s always a challenge because you put something out and then they’ll switch that around … to attack us for something. And that’s when you get this bunker mentality.”
Director of the University of Wollongong’s Bushfire Risk Management Centre, Owen Price, says bushfire managers could learn from the military’s after-action reviews where people involved in an incident discuss what happened without fear of repercussions.
“The idea is trying to do it better in future rather than saying somebody cocked up,” Price says.
“I mean, you can admit that somebody cocked up but let’s not crucify them. There’s a long history of blaming [the RFS] and it’s a major impediment to good people being willing to step up through the ranks because they see the criticism their superiors get and everybody closes ranks.”
Bushfire intelligence technology developed between the RFS and software company Kablamo may assist with the post-incident analysis. The RFS is already using it to predict where a fire is likely to spread. Kablamo co-CEO Angus Dorney says once the data is captured on a digital platform it will be much easier to analyse post-incident as well.
“Was it the right decision or wrong decision to light that backburn?” Dorney says. “You could line up several experts to say it was the right decision and several experts to say it was the wrong decision and nobody really knows. So what we need is structured data to look at those events. It’s not about finger-pointing, it’s about planning and optimising the way decisions are made.”
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