Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam
Mark Graham has had a harrowing week with friends and neighbours
battling a bushfire that destroyed his cabin and scorched deep into the
nearby rainforests of north-eastern NSW.
"This is a Gondwana
refugia - these areas have been permanently wet for tens of millions of
years and have never burnt," the ecologist said, pausing to take a phone
call while working on a seven kilometre-long firebreak near the World
Heritage-listed Mt Hyland reserve. "Big swathes are burning right now."
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| A fire burning in normally damp rainforest near the World-Heritage listed Mt Hyland nature reserve. Credit: Mark Graham |
While
fire agencies from Queensland and NSW prepare to boost efforts to
protect life and property as fire dangers mount again this weekend,
Graham and his team of volunteers have no choice but to take up the task
of stopping flames where they can.
"These type of trees have no
tolerance," Graham said, reeling off tropical species around him such as
ancient yellow carabeens, rosewoods and couchtrees. "If the fire comes
in, they die."
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| A soaring yellow Carabeen tree, perhaps a 1000 years old, reaching into a cloud of bushfire smoke near Mt Hyland. Credit: Mark Graham |
About
an hour away near Dorrigo , Becky Gibson was preparing to host visitors
to the camping ground she and her 89 year-old husband continue to run. A
week of howling winds and "a lot of smoke", though, have them anxious
about the summer to come.
"Normally
it's quite damp but it's very tinder dry right now," Gibson says,
noting rain gauges had collected just a quarter of typical yearly rain
of about 2000 millimetres. "I've never seen anything like this," she
says of her four decades in the area.
'Significant overture'
A
wide arc of eastern Australia is primed for a busier than usual fire
season. Large areas of NSW and Queensland are in the midst of a record
drought and the
Bureau of Meteorology forecasts pointing to below-average rainfall and warmer-than-normal temperatures for the rest of 2019 for most of the nation.
Ross
Bradstock, Director of the University of Wollongong's Centre for
Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, said fire danger ratings
will likely mount ahead of the passage of each cold front. Those bursts
of hot, dry and gusty winds can be expected to gradually shift
southwards to Sydney and beyond.
"We've got the ultra-dry fuels
now, and inexorably you’ll get ignitions," Bradstock says. "We’ve had an
overture and a pretty significant one. I think people down here better
start getting their act together right now."
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| A bushfire burns near Tenterfield in northern NSW. Credit: AAP |
For
Peter Petty, mayor of Tenterfield, the overture has been an extended
one. His town in northern NSW has among the tightest water restrictions -
at level 4.5 - in the country, and it has had fires burning near its
fringes for the past week.
Residents from nearby areas have been
evacuated to the showgrounds, which along with other public gardens in
this town of 3500, is gradually turning into a dustbowl.
"There's
still lots of smoke around," Petty says, adding fire authorities
"continue to be outstanding". Tankers had to spray treated sewage water
to spare other supplies.
The threat is here "every day", he says. "We're a long way out from being out of the woods."
'Like mid-summer'
Among
the lead agencies gearing up for long fire season is the NSW Rural Fire
Service, a body that boasts an annual budget of $385.8 million and
counts 72,491 volunteers.
While records show fires this early in the
spring have afflicted the Sunshine Coast and other parts of southern
Queensland and northern NSW before, the scale has set early challenges.
In NSW, for instance, fires scorched some 130,000 hectares, and the
three biggest blazes had a fire perimeter of 580 kilometres at the peak.
"There's
no record of fire dangers that high that early in those areas in NSW,"
Rob Rogers, the RFS's deputy commissioner, says. "The fires were burning
like it was mid-summer."
Across
the state, the "only bright spot" is around Tumut in the Snowy
Mountains but mostly because conditions are not as aberrantly dry as
elsewhere.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, rainfall over
much of the fire-hit regions has been the lowest on record for the 20
months starting January 2018, and the 32 months starting January 2017.
Similarly, the northern Murray-Darling Basin is tracking record low
rainfall totals for those two periods.
Rainfall deficiencies over the past 17 months
April 1, 2018 - August 31, 2019
 |
| Source: Bureau of Meteorology |
During a recent
visit to the Pilliga state forest in northern NSW, her team saw highly
stressed trees that had shed their entire canopy and had started to
resprout as if they had been burnt. Even some of the regrowth was
starting to die.Few people are watching how
vegetation is drying out more closely than Rachael Nolan, a researcher
for the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment.
"When that happens, things are pretty bad," Nolan said. "Some were quite serious."
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| Scribbly gum trees in the Pilliga Forest in north-western NSW look like they are re-sprouting after a fire - but there hasn't been one in that area. Credit: Rachael Nolan |
Her
main work, though, has been to develop fuel moisture maps using
satellites that provide up-to-date data for scientists and fire
authorities.
Moisture
levels in dead trees and other vegetation can change overnight
following a shower but changes in living plants "provide a very good
indication of what will happen next week and the week after that".
For
the region around Sydney, the indicators point to a rapid drying off,
particularly in the Blue Mountains and to the city's north-west.
Mean live fuel moisture content in Sydney region
August 21 - September 5
 |
| Source: R.H.Nolan, M.M. Boer and R.A. Bradstock |
Nolan
stresses having dry fuel "is no guarantee that we will get fires",
noting conditions were similarly dry this time a year ago but handy
spring rains eased the threat.That said, the rate the vegetation has
been curing is greater this year than in 2013, the last year when large
fires burnt near Sydney particularly in the Blue Mountains.
Median live fuel moisture content, Sydney Basin
 |
| Source: R.H.Nolan, M.M. Boer and R.A. Bradstock |
Upward trend in fire risks
Along
with the abnormally dry conditions, temperatures in the fire-hit
regions were unusual. Maximum readings on September 5 and 6 were about
10 degrees warmer than average, the Bureau says.
What
is becoming more typical, though, is the rate at which heat records
continue to tumble. Nationwide, for instance, daytime temperatures are
tracking the warmest
record for the first eight months of 2019 and
last summer was Australia's hottest.
Since
temperatures are a key component of dangerous fire weather - along with
fuel, wind and humidity - it is not surprising climate change is
nudging Australia's fire risks higher.
The latest BoM-CSIRO State
of the Climate report shows southern and eastern regions have had some
of the biggest increases in the fire danger indices in recent decades.
How fire danger risks are rising in Australia
 |
| Source: Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO |
Hamish
Clarke, a fire researcher at the University of Wollongong and Western
Sydney University, said that inter-year variability shows annual
fluctuations in fire risks can be "quite considerable" but the trend is
clearly upwards.
“Across the country, at a number of high-quality
long-term weather stations, there had either been an increase, or no
change," Clarke says. "We didn’t find a significant decrease anywhere.”
Climate
modelling by Clarke on NSW and ACT and other researchers show the
trajectory for temperatures is also upward while the impacts on other
fire weather variables such as vegetation or wind speeds are less clear.
“Generally
speaking the increases [of fire threats] are much more than the
decreases and the areas much more, but some models show some decrease.
“It’s
not much comfort because there are more models that are projecting
quite large changes in both average and extreme conditions, with spring
particularly highlighted,” he said.
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| Fires erupted in dozens of locations at the end of last week, including near Lithgow in the Blue Mountains. Credit: Nine News |
Andrew Dowdy, a senior bureau climate researcher at the bureau, concurs.
"The
projections show a clear trend towards more dangerous near-surface fire
weather conditions for Australia" based on the McArthur Forest Fire
Danger Index, Dowdy states in a recently published report in a
Nature journal.
What can be done?
Bradstock says the question of whether human-induced climate change is worsening the fire threat in Australia is "old hat".
“The
research has all been done. We don’t need to keep doing it," he says.
"The big research challenge is how we’re going to adapt, and build
resilient communities, and how will our ecosystems cope with the double
combination of fire and drought.”
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| The Boeing 737, dubbed 'Gaia', in action for the NSW Rural Fire Service. Credit: NSW RFS, via Facebook |
Adaptation
is taking many forms, including additional "toys" such as NSW's newly
bought 737 Large Air Tanker, with its 15,142-litre payload to drop on
blazes.
Retardant-carrying drones may also feature but only when costs fall much further, Rogers says.
Instead,
residents are more likely to tap into information technology advances
that will help them understand the evolving threats near them.
It
is only a matter of time before people in bushfire-prone areas will be
able to be alerted to changes in fire weather, fuel loads and potential
fire behavior.
Already being rolled out in different states is the University of Tasmania-developed
AirRater app for smart phones that can provide real-time air quality readings including smoke.
A
fire in a dried-out peat swamp near Port Macquarie, for instance has
been choking residents for weeks. The new app, complete with sensors,
was rolled out within weeks.
Insurance prod
Concern about
smoke from hazard-reduction fires is one reason fire authorities
sometimes have to curb their burning near large population centres such
as Sydney or Melbourne.
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| A bushfire near Springwood in the Blue Mountains in October 2013. Credit: Dallas Kilponen |
Insurance
companies, though, monitor closely the work being done, and receive at
least annual snapshots of how close vegetation is to properties in
fire-prone areas.
Damage claims from bushfires are not yet "loss
leaders" for the industry compared with cyclones, floods and storms,
Karl Sullivan, head of risk operations for the Insurance Council of
Australia, says.
Still, the Council has already declared the early
season fires catastrophes, with $13.5 million in loss claims from 120
properties, with the toll expected to mount.
Since the 2009
bushfires, authorities have imposed tighter building codes requiring
more fire-resistant materials and design that can cut premiums by about
10 per cent.
“These properties are by no means fire-proof...but
they’re definitely more fire resilient, and that’s typically reflected
in fire premiums," Sullivan says.
Mark Leplastrier, executive
manager for natural perils at IAG, says bushfires were increasingly
occurring outside the traditional fire season and in some areas of
Victoria, for instance, were a greater risk for insurers than floods.
Fire
damage risks were likely to continue to rise - but so were other
climate-change perils that were poorly integrated into risk assessments,
he says. For instance, houses might be better designed for wind stress
in cyclone regions but they may still be hammered by water ingress
caused by the higher storm surges.
Avoiding 'ecosystem collapse'
Justin
Leonard, research leader for CSIRO's bushfire adaptation unit, said
national building codes revised after Victoria's 2009 Black Saturday
bushfires still had "significant flaws".
The focus of the new
AS3959 code paid too little attention to ensuring builders avoid
combustible materials in the roof, walls and below the floor, he said. A
better alternative was
the NASH steel-frame standard.
For
instance, the revised code allowed flammable wooden decks. Residents
might also do the right thing and place distance between their house and
other structures on their property but still be just 1.8 metres of a
neighbour's home.
"There's no special building consideration for that impact," he says.
For
Bradstock, the evidence from western US is that Australian cities may
be setting themselves up for big fire losses in the future.
"We’re building these very large houses...with very little spaces between houses," he says.
"If
you get a fast-moving grass fire, and if it gets into them, there’s the
possibility of very extensive spread," he says. "The evidence suggests
you’re setting yourselves up for a problem.”
Bradstock said there had
been “really no concerted effort to understand the resilience of our
human systems to the multiple challenges of drought and fire", and those
knowledge gaps could prove costly to communities.
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| Queensland bushfires: the surprise was how close they came to populated parts of the state. Credit: Cameron Neville, via QFES |
Likewise
the burning of previously wet wilderness areas of Tasmania and now
along the eastern coast in the past week were a reminder that the
natural environment may also be reaching thresholds."We just assume that these things are resilient,"he says. "They may not be.”
Up
at Billy's Creek near Mt Hyland, Mark Graham was preparing to take a
break after a week of battling fires that have charred as much as
100,000 hectares.
"We're trying to save the most ancient of the
ancients," he says, adding society still has time to confront the threat
of a warming climate before it is too late.
"There's still a chance to avoid having these ecosystems collapse around us."
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