Australia, scarred by bush fires, on high alert for dangerous summer

SYDNEY – Four years after bush fires destroyed wide swathes of south-eastern Australia, killing 33 people, the country is once again on high alert, bracing itself for what weather experts say will be the hottest, driest period since the so-called Black Summer.

Just into the Australian spring, which starts in September, heat records are being broken in the densely populated area around Sydney, with some regional schools closed because of the risk of bush fire, a month before the official bush fire season begins.

Adding to the tension, unusually heavy rain after the fires of 2019 and 2020 spurred vegetation growth, producing more foliage to burn in an El Nino weather event, which was declared on Tuesday. El Nino events are typified by hot, dry weather.

“Once we’ve actually dried out the landscape from the wet conditions it’s starting from, it could be that we end up with a landscape that’s very dry but now has a lot of fuel because we’ve had such good vegetation growth,” said Professor Jason Evans of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

“Those would be perfect conditions for bush fires,” he said.

Australians watched with grim recognition as wildfires ripped through Europe and North America in the 2023 Northern Hemisphere summer. Now there is a sense that it is Australia’s turn again, with global warming speeding up and exaggerating changes in weather patterns, according to climate scientists.

Of Australia’s 10 hottest years on record, eight of them have occurred since 2010, meteorologists say.

The short amount of time since the last catastrophic bush fire season has contributed to delays in hazard reduction burns, where firefighters pre-emptively burn areas to limit the spread of bush fires, as some volunteer firefighters have quit because of trauma, said the New South Wales Rural Fire Service.

The persistent heavy rain has also slowed the fire service’s ability to carry out controlled burns. With dozens of bush fires already burning, the volunteer service said it had done just 24 per cent of the hazard reduction it had planned.

“We’ve just had rain after rain after rain event, so we’re quite behind,” Rural Fire Service commissioner Bob Rogers told Reuters.

The heavy rain also means that despite the return of dry heat, the starting conditions are different from the fires of 2019 and 2020, which followed a lengthy drought, said Mr Rogers.

While rich in fuel, at least the landscape is not tinder-dry like it was in the Black Summer.

Mr Rogers added that, regardless, the fire service was taking it very seriously. “While it may not be as bad as (the Black Summer), you don’t need a fire season to be as bad as that for it to destroy homes and indeed take lives.” REUTERS