Early Lessons Emerge From Bushfires As Disaster Review Season Begins

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam | Laura Chung

Early last month, as fire crews monitored a huge blaze burning out of control beneath a major power transmission line near Batemans Bay, a senior Rural Fire Service official signalled a very different challenge that awaits once the bushfire emergency finally recedes.
“At the back of our minds, we know there’ll be inquiries coming,” he said, just before overhead cables ominously twanged, forcing an immediate move from those nearby.

Volunteer firefighters work to keep a fire north of Batemans Bay from crossing the Kings Highway, in early January 2020. Credit: Kate Geraghty

Indeed, the disaster review season has begun, with the Berejiklian government this week declaring the first of what could be a blitz of formal probes. It unveiled plans for a six-month independent inquiry to examine the role played by climate change, drought, fuel loads and human activity.This coming week, the Morrison government will likely consider a royal commission. If history is any guide, the pile of past bushfire inquiries, already some 56 reports high since the 1939 Stretton report into Victoria’s Black Friday fires, will be stacked a lot higher before long.
The inquisitions already have much to work through with 12 million hectares torched - the equivalent of 1.5 Tasmanias - and the fire season still has months to run. Canberra remains under threat from a blaze - started by an army helicopter’s lights which ignited dry vegetation - and large areas of Victoria, NSW and elsewhere remain at risk.

More than 1000 power poles were burnt in NSW in the fires so far this season. Credit: Kate Geraghty

The military’s belated direct intervention - Prime Minister Scott Morrison called in the 3000 reservists and sent in naval ships only when the emergency peaked in early January - could feature highly.
Australia’s armed forces have been quietly “war-gaming” disasters including large bushfires with federal and state agencies for years. Scenario testing is what most militaries do, and the memory of Cyclone Tracy’s devastation of Darwin around Christmas Day in 1974 - which prompted the dispatch of almost every available plane and ship - hasn’t been forgotten.
A multi-year project, the Australian Vulnerability Profile, led by the CSIRO, is just one of a series of programs that have been workshopping away with the aim of improving preparedness for calamities and the necessary “pathways” to recovery for communities and governments alike.
The project detailed scenarios for South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia/Northern Territory, but it was ended before the country’s two most populous states - NSW and Victoria - had mock disaster runs of their own.
The SA scenario came closest to the current crisis in that it modelled a multi-day heatwave similar to the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires with temperatures approaching 50 degrees. A 5.6-magnitude earthquake, similar to one that rocked the state in 1954, was added to the mix.


Shocking footage taken on January 4 by the Dunmore Rural Fire Brigade in NSW shows how a bushfire engulfs an area in just over three minutes.

Michael Thomas, a retired army major, says the military has been preparing for years for the challenges from climate change, such as a simultaneous extreme bushfire event at home and a more intense cyclone smashing one of our Pacific neighbours.
“The [Australian Defence Force’s] voice has been lost in the Australian debate,” Thomas told the Herald in January. "Climate change is talked about as a 'threat multiplier' but it's actually a 'burden multiplier.'"
Whether or not the ADF should have been more involved in the fire efforts sooner and in greater effect - such as acquiring or renting Module Airborne Firefighting Systems (MAFFs) to convert military transport planes into 30,000-litre water bombers - will likely feature in the inquiries.
But Thomas says it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how even the military could quickly get overwhelmed by “sudden, multiple regional disasters”.
“The ADF becomes very stretched, very quickly in its ability to respond,” he says.

Fires have burnt through about 12 million hectares of Australia this season, or 1.5 times the size of Tasmania. Credit: James Brickwood

Chris Barrie, a retired admiral and former chief of the Defence Force, and now adjunct professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, agrees the public has largely been left in the dark about how much disaster scenario work has been under way.  He says military leaders have become accustomed to downplaying climate change in their public utterances since the Abbott government. This includes a reluctance by senior officers to commend junior offices for their work on such security issues. “They don’t get any support," he said.
A spokesperson for the ADF says the 2016 Defence White Paper identified climate change "as one of the causes of state fragility, a key driver of our security environment to 2035".
"Defence factors climate change considerations into our strategic planning for Defence capabilities, estate, personnel and equipment, as well as related operational responses and preparedness."

The clean-up and recovery costs from the fires will run into the billions of dollars nationally. Debate will likely turn to whether governments could have done more to limit the bill. Credit: Nick Moir

An insider who has worked on joint efforts by federal and state agencies says the disconnect between research and policy is widespread. For instance, some lower-level work on preparing for disasters such as worsening bushfires doesn’t make to the highest levels, including ministers, because it won’t be “re-funded” when the program ends, the official said, requesting anonymity.
The most prominent federal effort to increase the nation's climate resilience, the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, lost its funding in 2017 under the Turnbull government, when Scott Morrison was treasurer.
And, as the ABC reported last September, regular meetings of the heads of federal government department - the so-called Secretaries Group on Climate Risk - started meeting in March 2017 and abruptly stopped in the middle of 2018. Meetings of less senior officials continue.
Barrie is among those who say the reliance on a mostly volunteer firefighting force, as in NSW, will likely be prominent in any review of how prepared agencies were for this fire season and whether it will be “future fit” in a warming world. With an average age of active volunteers at more than 50 years, “that doesn’t really work”, he says.
Officially, the RFS has grown into one of the largest firefighting services in the world, with about 72,491 volunteers at last count.

Army reservices are helping with cleanup operations across bushfire affected areas. Credit: Justin McManus

Mick Holton, president of the Volunteer Fire Firefighters Association, says the true figure is probably closer to 18,500 volunteers. “We've said all along [the 70,000-plus figure] is not the case and if it was the case, they wouldn’t have to import all these other firefighting resources as they have had to,” he says.
Ben Shepherd, a senior RFS spokesman, earlier in the season said 46,000 volunteers were “more or less active” with many playing key support roles, from drivers to managing logistics and assisting at air bases.
With this fire season already approaching six months and more big battles in prospect before it ends, scrutiny is turning to how volunteers are coping - physically, mentally and financially.
One seasoned RFS firefighter, already active for months this season, has watched on with a mix of frustration and determination as the extent and severity of the bushfires appears to have caught authorities routinely on the hop.
As far as he could tell, there were no bushfire plans for public assets in his area, whether it was for power substations, water supplies or even some fire sheds - often the place locals would be expected to evacuate to if they were unable to defend their homes and couldn’t leave the area. In his area, crews were scrambling to clear vegetation from RFS depots on the day before the worst of the fire dangers.

Australia had its hottest and driest year on record in 2019 - factors that have contributed to what fire agencies say are "unprecedented" bushfires this season. Credit: Nick Moir

The one sector that appeared to have a “really detailed” plan to reduce fire risks to their assets was the power industry, including Ausgrid and Endeavour Energy.
A spokeswoman for Endeavour Energy said the group aims to "fire proof" major zone substations by using vegetation exclusion zones and fire walls surrounding substations located in bushland."[The] Tomerong zone substation on the South Coast survived a ferocious South Coast fire due to this design, she said. Fires burnt across 45 per cent of Endeavour’s network area, "but we only had minor damage to one zone substation at Hartley Vale in the Blue Mountains".
Other preparations included the use of helicopters equipped with cameras and light detection imaging radar to pinpoint network defects and identify encroaching vegetation, which are then fixed before the bushfire season starts, she said.
Trent Penman, an associate professor in bushfire behaviour at the University of Melbourne, says the inquiries should, where possible, be community led, since they can be an important process for the public to air their grievances and even grief. Handled badly, they can also add to the trauma of those giving evidence or submissions, he says.
However, any tinkering with the volunteer model should also be done cautiously as such firefighters were often the core of local communities.  “In NSW and Victoria ... they’ve done an amazing job given the circumstances,” he says, noting the human death toll, tragic as it was at 32, could have been much higher given the scale of the blazes.
And while the reviews will have to tackle complex issues - such as why some backburns got away or whether increased hazard reduction burning would make much difference to reducing fire risks -  there is no need for hasty verdicts.
"The decisions we take over the next six months to six years will play out over the long term,” he says.
The RFS itself says it welcomed the inquiry but would also conduct its own internal one. "We owe it to the community and future generations to review what has happened and take lessons wherever possible to improve for the future,” a spokeswoman said.

Links

• Praise for inquiry but more investigations to come, former fire chief warns
• NSW wildlife recovery plan to stress protection of unburnt areas
• The country's top bureaucrats say Government appears unprepared for climate change
• 'Dystopian future': Climate change to force review of military's role
• Australian Vulnerability Profile
• Safety in numbers: As a horror fire season looms, firefighters are struggling to attract new volunteers
• (AU) Getting Down To The Business Of Evolving Australia's Climate Policy
• Top Academics Write To Morrison Government Asking For 'Deep Cuts' To Australia's Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• (AU) Climate Change Is A Serious Threat To National Security

Thomas Keneally: ‘These Fires Have Changed Us’

The Guardian - Thomas Keneally

The swamp near my home has been dry for two years, and fires burn down to the beaches

A firefighter battles a fire consuming a home near Bundanoon, New South Wales. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

Thomas Keneally Thomas Keneally is the author of more than 30 novels, including Schindler’s Ark, which won the Booker prize in 1982. This article has details on how to help with the Australian relief effort.

Last Australian autumn, and all through winter, a group of retired fire chiefs wanted to meet with prime minister Scott Morrison, and warn him that Australia had passed, as if through a gate, to a new level of combustibility, and that the fire peril for the coming summer would be unprecedented in length and ferocity. For fear that the group might link this menace with the forbidden term “climate change”, the leader Australians now call “Scotty from marketing” refused to meet them, though in good faith they kept on trying to arrange a session with him into the spring. As they pointed out, Morrison took considerably less time before meeting church leaders who wanted to be exempt from anti-discrimination laws involving the employment of gay staff and similar “freedom of religion” matters. The fire chiefs worried that we share our combustibility with the Pacific coast of the United States, and that given the overlapping North American and Australian fire seasons, the hiring of air tankers was going to get more and more difficult. Above all, they were concerned that this summer’s fires would take on a new scale and not surrender to normal firefighting. They felt they had begun to see abnormal symptoms in the 1990s.

Once we got over our colonial Eurocentrism and realised that the Australian bush was not going to go to any trouble to imitate European flora, we began to take a perverse pride in the fact that so many of our plants are germinated by fire: “phoenix plants”. We know now that our species has been in Australia so long, for tens of millennia, that Indigenous Australians learned fire-stick farming – regenerating the continent with skilfully lit fires, which also had the benefit of flushing protein-rich marsupials out into the open. The reality is that swathes of Australia must burn for its own good. Les Murray, the late, great poet, said Australia had only two seasons: drought, of which fires were symptomatic, and flood.

Both sides of the country, east and west, have had calamitous drought and fires in their time. But the drying out to which Australia has been subjected in this last year is unprecedented and seems to most people to proclaim climate crisis. The denialists are making a last stand by accusing the Greens of preventing back-burning in national parks; and of course the Murdoch press embraces that proposition and emphasises cases of arson. The fact that there are cases of arson, and always have been in Australia and California, explains a minority of blazes, but it does not explain the voracity and appetite of these flames. On the right wing of the coalition that governs Australia, and which Morrison needs if he is to govern, sturdy climate denial remains undented. Yet the climate crisis has for the first time replaced the economy as the nation’s chief political issue, for the very question of the habitability of Australia now stares us in the face. On 4 January, an outer suburb of Sydney – Penrith, below the Blue Mountains that were burning at the time – achieved the highest temperature on Earth that day, 48.9C. Sydney suburbs, as hot as they can be in summer, have never achieved such Saharan heights before.

Kosciuszko national park in New South Wales, shrouded in smoke from the fires. Photograph: Walter Bibikow/Getty Images/AWL

What have I noticed, living as I do between the harbour and the Pacific Ocean on the North Head of Sydney? Day after day, beginning as early as August, smoke has rendered going abroad in the city an unknown risk about which experts warn us but cannot accurately predict. Air quality has on some days been 11 times the hazardous level.

Today, a Thursday in late January, is better than many days, in that the air quality is merely poor and visibility good, though not as good as it traditionally is on cut-crystal summer days on the coast. We have frequently been sunk in smoky dimness. The water in the smoke condenses on particles and creates a kind of cloud we have seen a lot of, the pyrocumulonimbus, which blankets the earth but does not bring rain, although it is capable of creating dry lightning. For most of my life, heat waves – and today is nudging 40 and qualifies – used always to bring, after a time, a southerly change in the late afternoon or evening. There were always strong winds and a drenching thunderstorm. In the last few years, we have had to get used to the southerly buster that brings no rain, the dry southerly that whips up fire. There is no rain forecast for today or at the end of this hot spate, though there is a prediction for next week.

The New South Wales coast is a place of childhood vacations and dreams, with beaches that stretch for miles

I am lucky enough to live next to a national park, and when I first moved here there was a hanging swamp on top of the vast sandstone block of North Head. This was a swamp that in most seasons had water in it, though it would occasionally dry out for short periods. It was the home of a number of species of frog. It was visited by ducks and other water birds, and by a handsome lizard called the water dragon, which enjoyed eating the tiger moths that lived there. That swamp has been dry for two years. Drying out has happened all along the coast, and we have had the extraordinary spectacle of fires burning down to the fringe of beaches, and populations taken off the coast by warship.

The New South Wales coast is a place of childhood vacations and dreams, with atmospheric paperbark swamps running behind beaches that stretch for miles. The lagoons and swamps were perpetually too moist to burn. Fires burning down to the coast is, to use the catchphrase, the new normal. The coast and its valleys and beaches have been places where great numbers of nature lovers, retirees and escapees from the city have chosen to settle. The coast north and south of Sydney is a dream every city dweller has entertained, a migration always on the cards for us. Now an exceptional vulnerability has overtaken regions where people previously lived securely in the bush. The Keneallys’ chosen town on immigration – Kempsey, New South Wales – has for the first time since settlement been ringed by fire. Its long, exquisite river, the Macleay, has become tainted with so much ash that fish have died. Even rainforest has become combustible.

Recently, on a walk in the bush, I encountered one of the species threatened, by the fires and the state of the world, with extinction. It is one of the two survivors from the ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland: the echidna, a spiny anteater that both lays an egg and suckles its young in the comfort of its burrow. I love this creature: it gives off an air, despite its limited movement, of industry, and she was turning over the earth to the depth of her beak in her search for provender. It was touching to see this most enduring of animals at its ancient earthwork, unchallenged by fire here, unlike in other forests. It speaks to how much human occupation, a tower of millennia, there has been in Australia, and of the contrast between its Indigenous stewards and the stewardship of us immigrant groups. It had taken us less than two and a half centuries to bring the 50m-year-surviving echidna, and the system sustaining it, to crisis.

The fires threaten some species with extinction, including the echidna, or spiny anteater. Photograph: Lisa Mckelvie/Getty Images

In this crisis, the volunteer bush firefighter was once an unassertive creature like the echidna. Now, in an age of bitter politics and economic palaver, they have asserted themselves as miracles of social cohesion and human goodwill. The volunteers often come from areas in which they are fighting the fires, and in many cases have helped save houses without knowing if their own home was still standing. They were also, of necessity, the first comforters of those who had survived the loss of their houses. They have lost wages and tested the patience of their employers by needing to take tranches of time off work. One of the retired fire chiefs who tried to speak to “Sco-Mo” last year was Greg Mullins, a volunteer who recently said, “Like countless other men and women on the front line, I have faced off against 30m walls of flame, seen many homes burned to the ground, tried to console inconsolable residents, been forced to run for safety and seen native animals bounding out of the burning bush to collapse and die.” He is angered as politicians describe climate change as “perhaps one of the factors”.

These fires have not been a straw in the wind. They have been brutally manifest and undeniable in the force of their argument. They have the power to change politics here and in other places, as long as they are read honestly. After our long glorying in minerals, it is promised that, if it wishes, Australia can be a leader in the new post-fossil-fuel world. It is a destiny our politicians seem unwilling to embrace, but they may have to.

For the fires have changed us. Perhaps we, too, need fire to germinate an essential concept.

Links

• (AU) Dear Australia, Elegy For A Summer Of Loss
• Six Sentences Of Hope: Defining A Unifying Vision In The Face Of The Climate Crisis
• The Climate Crisis Movie Isn’t Out Yet, But We Just Saw The Trailer
• We All Smell The Smoke, We All Feel The Heat. This Environmental Catastrophe Is Global
• We Underestimate Young People Because It's Convenient
• Tim Winton: Our Leaders Are Ignoring Global Warming To The Point Of Criminal Negligence. It's Unforgivable
• ‘We’ve pissed mother nature off, big time’: the people coming home after Australia’s fires

Heritage On The Edge Urges Action On The Climate Crisis

Google - Toshiyuki Kono

Protecting cultural sites against climate change.

Dr. Toshiyuki Kono Dr. Toshiyuki Kono is President of the International Council on Monuments and Sites. Distinguished Professor Kono also teaches private international law and heritage law at Japan's Kyushu University.

Preserving and protecting the past is essential for our future. This belief is at the core of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), a global non-government organization dedicated to the conservation of architectural and archaeological heritage.
Our 10,000 members across the globe—including architects, archeologists, geographers, planners and anthropologists—share the same vision: to protect and promote the world’s cultural heritage. The recent youth climate demonstrations shed a spotlight on the urgency of the climate crisis, which is having a devastating effect on our cultural monuments too. It is important to take action, and we must act now to save this part of our human legacy.
That’s why, in collaboration with CyArk and Google Arts & Culture, we’re launching Heritage on the Edge, a new online experience that stresses the gravity of the situation through the lens of five UNESCO World Heritage Sites. You can join us and explore over 50 online exhibits, 3D models, Street View tours, and interviews with local professionals and communities about Rapa Nui’s (Easter Island) iconic statues, the great mosque city of Bagerhat in Bangladesh, the adobe metropolis of Chan Chan in Peru, Scotland’s Edinburgh Castle and the coastal city of Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania—all heritage sites that are affected by the climate crisis.
Above all, the project is a call to action. The effects of climate change on our cultural heritage mirror wider impacts on our planet, and require a strong and meaningful response. While actions at individual sites can prevent loss locally, the only sustainable solution is systemic change and the global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Heritage on the Edge collects stories of loss, but also of hope and resilience. They remind us that all our cultural heritage, including these iconic World Heritage Sites, are more than just tourist destinations. They are places of great national, spiritual and cultural significance.

Built from volcanic stone  by the native Polynesian inhabitants from the 10th to 16th centuries, the Easter Island Statues—called Moai—stand at an average height of 13 feet and weigh 14 tons each. As sea levels rise and storms increase, the cliffs where the monuments are located are being undercut. The statues will eventually fall into the sea.

 

Peru's Chan Chan is the world’s largest adobe city. It is being washed away by increasing torrential rain caused by climate change. But building roofs won’t solve the problem either: Thanks to rising groundwater levels, they could cause a dangerous microclimate and ultimately affect the buildings’ structural stability.

 

A 3D visualization of the Nine Dome Mosque in the Mosque City of Bagerhat in Bangladesh uses a “point cloud” to represent its high concentration of finely made religious monuments and spatial planning. But the monuments are rapidly decaying due to salt water flooding and erosion. With help of this data we were able to also create another dedicated “Pocket Gallery” that lets you explore the Nine Dome Mosque in Augmented Reality.

 

The historic fortress and urban center of Edinburgh is Scotland's most-visited tourist attraction and at risk from rapidly increasing rainfall and groundwater flooding.

 

Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania is the most famous Swahili Coast trading port on the Indian Ocean. Site Director Mercy Mbogellah and her team monitor and work to preserve the site, which is at risk from sea-level rise, mangrove depletion and ocean acidification. Explore the site’s Gereza Fort and the impact of climate change up close in a Augmented Reality “Pocket Gallery”.

 
Links

• Heritage on the Edge
• The Heritage Sites Threatened By Climate Change
• The Future of Heritage in Three Dimensions
• It’s not just Venice. Climate change imperils ancient treasures everywhere.
• Cultural Heritage Has A Lot To Teach Us About Climate Change
• We’re Covering Heritage Sites Threatened By Climate Change. The List Just Got Longer.
• From The Everglades To Kilimanjaro, Climate Change Is Destroying World Wonders