Last summer’s bushfire disaster was so unusual that traditional firefighting methods, such as hazard reduction burning, failed in some instances, an inquiry into the crisis heard.
The final report of the New South Wales (NSW) bushfire inquiry, published yesterday, said the 2019-2020 bushfire season brought fires in forested regions on a scale not seen in recorded history in Australia.
“The season showed us what damage megafires can do, and how dangerous they can be for our communities and firefighters,” the inquiry chairs — former NSW police deputy commissioner Dave Owens and former NSW chief scientist Mary O’Kane — said in their opening summary.
“And it is clear that we should expect fire seasons like 2019-20 or potentially worse to happen again,” they said.
The NSW government said that it would be adopting all of the report’s 76 recommendations, which include the establishment of a major new center for bushfire research and technology, new training to increase the capacity of fire authorities to deal with disasters of the scale seen in 2019-2020, and examination of existing preparedness strategies to determine the best approach to increasingly frequent, extreme fire seasons.
The inquiry found climate change and rising greenhouse gas emissions “clearly played a role in the conditions that led up to the fires and in the unrelenting conditions that supported the fires to spread,” but climate change alone “does not explain everything that happened.”
“The 2019-20 bush fire season challenged conventional assumptions. For example, it appears that the extreme dryness of forested regions over large continuous areas was the determining factor in the size of the fires,” it read.
The report said extreme conditions of the kind seen last summer are likely to happen again and dangerous fires will become more frequent, meaning state and local authorities would need to do more to prepare.
Former fire chiefs who have called for an urgent response from governments to the climate crisis said the findings of the review supported their position.
During the fire season, former fire chiefs from several states said their advice to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government that the climate crisis was making fire seasons worse had been ignored.
“The NSW bushfire inquiry has echoed what the experts have said all along: Climate change is driving longer, hotter and more dangerous bushfire seasons, including our Black Summer,” said Greg Mullins, a former fire and NSW rescue commissioner.
Australia was in a new era of climate-driven bushfires in which fires were more likely to develop dangerous pyroconvection events, Mullins said.
Governments needed to do more to address the underlying cause, he added.
“Immediate steps the NSW state government can take to drive down emissions include: rejecting all new coal and gas projects like Santos’ Narrabri project, and accelerating its net-zero plan to create clean, long-term jobs in sectors like renewable energy,” he said.
The report said the scale of the disaster meant fire services were stretched in their capacity to respond, even with interstate and international support.
Authorities could not get to all fires fast enough and fires started by lightning in remote areas made suppression difficult.
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