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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

Over the weekend, 85 fires blazed across New South Wales, while fires remained out of control in Gippsland in Victoria yesterday, and more threatened homes in rural Queensland.

It’s a frightening start to bushfire season and summer isn’t even here yet.

For many, it conjures fears about whether we could see a repeat of the 2019 Black Summer.

Today, contributor to The Saturday Paper and former commissioner of Fire and Rescue New South Wales Greg Mullins, on why the last few weeks have changed his mind about the summer ahead.

It’s Wednesday October 4th.

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ANGE:

Greg, you live north of Sydney at the edge of the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park and recently you've been helping to organise hazard reduction burns. How have they been going?

GREG:

Well look, unfortunately, not very well. We've had three years of rain so we’re way behind on the program. And just as it was drying out, we'd have maybe once, once a fortnight, a little shower of rain, a few millimetres here and there. That was enough to put off burning for a week. So there's a huge backlog, and this is reflected across Australia really, where firefighters, national parks, forestry agencies, urban fire services have wanted to do a lot of preventative burning and just haven't been able to because of that rain. And then, just a week ago, we were ready to do more burns and then we're into extreme and even catastrophic fire weather. So it was just too dangerous to burn. And this is what's been happening with climate change worldwide. The windows to do hazard reduction burning, which is the best mitigation you can possibly do across a wide area, are just closing. They're just becoming smaller and smaller and making it very, very difficult for authorities to keep people safe.

ANGE:

And as you’re preparing for the bushfire season ahead, are you thinking that it's going to be particularly significant? I’m wondering what you think we’re in for.

GREG:

It's already a significant fire season. So, September, October, things are just starting to roll in terms of fire weather. But this year it looks particularly bad.

Audio excerpt – Reporter 1:

“Good evening, fast moving bushfires in two Queensland towns have forced the evacuation of multiple homes.”

Audio excerpt – Reporter 2:

“Three new emergency warnings in Gippsland, as out of control bushfires threaten lives and homes.”

Audio excerpt – Reporter 3:

“Sydney returns to fire-ban from midnight, ahead of another scorcher tomorrow, with temperatures in the Western suburbs to hit the high 30s again. There are 80 fires burning statewide…”

GREG:

Now that's not unusual, that's what we see after a triple La Nina. What, I suppose, is unusual is this early start now that in the last 20 years our fire seasons have lengthened by about 6 to 8 weeks. We're getting the fires far earlier. This is paralleled worldwide. California, their fire seasons are longer by months. And this is an impact of climate change.

ANGE:

And I guess the memory of the 2019/2020 bushfires are fresh in everyone's minds. And the question you must get a lot is, you know, are we going to see what we saw back then? Is it going to get that bad?

GREG:

I'm starting to change my view. I have to say, having seen the fire weather that we've received just in the last couple of weeks. Now, why I said I don't expect another Black Summer, simply the duration. The Black Summer fires started in July. We're now into October, and so it's not as long. We went into Black Summer on the back of two years of drought and the bush was dying. We're not seeing that yet. But what I am worried about is the phenomena of flash drought. Now we saw that in Maui, with the fires in Maui, it was already dry, they had very heavy fuel loads and they had several weeks of very, very high temperatures, which evaporates all the moisture out of the growth. And then they had very strong winds.

Audio excerpt – Reporter 4:

“We can see most of the island under moderate drought, and even along the coastline here, severe drought. So, things were already dry, we had the strong winds. All it took was a spark, or whatever started those fires…”

GREG:

So that those two components can change the nature of the fire season very quickly. And we're starting to see that. Just September, October, already we're seeing these very hot temperatures as hot air masses come across Australia. And the El Nino and Indian Ocean dipole effects will reduce cloud cover across Central Australia, which will mean more heatwaves. So we could get some very, very bad fires.

ANGE:

Right, and as someone who’s had a long career fighting fires, how have you noticed all these changes in weather patterns, and the impact of climate change, unfold right in front of you?

GREG:

So in a nutshell, what climate change has done to bushfire seasons, with the average temperature higher, the extremes are more extreme. And to give an example, when I was a young firefighter, I'd think that a 40 degree day was just extraordinary, going out fighting bushfires. But during Black Summer one day in particular, and I'll never forget it, 21st of December 2019, it was nudging 49 degrees in western Sydney and I was fighting fires in Blackheath and the Blue Mountains and became severely dehydrated after about a 23 hour shift. So it's getting much harder. With those higher temperatures, we're getting extreme fire behaviour so that heat pushes up into the stratosphere 10 to 13 kilometres high, and you get fire generated lightning storms, with no rain. So the lightning starts new fires, and as anyone who's been through a severe storm knows, you get downdraughts, wind squalls, winds coming from every direction, that can even rip trees out of the ground.

It's not much fun fighting fires under those storms. They used to be rare, about 60 cases between 1978 to 2018. In that one fire season, that one six month period, we had probably more than 30, at least 29, but probably more than 30. So exponentially worse. And the last thing, fires can burn overnight as if it's during the day. And that used to be the time where firefighters would get in and contain fires because the flame heights would drop, the winds would abate, it would become more moist in the air, the humidity would become higher, the temperature would drop. Sometimes temperatures don't drop, the wind's keep blowing and the humidity stays low. So you’re battling extreme fires at night, which in my early days of firefighting, it's 52 years today since I started firefighting, and we never saw anything like that when I was a young firefighter.

ANGE:

So, how can Australia protect itself from another devastating bushfire season? That’s coming up, after the break.

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ANGE:

Greg, I want to talk about the 2019 to 2020 bushfire season, Black summer, a bit more. In 2019, you helped to create Emergency Leaders for Climate Action and in that capacity, you and others tried to warn the Prime Minister at the time, Scott Morrison, about the upcoming bushfires. Why was it so difficult to get the Government, at that time, to listen?

GREG:

Well, it was ideological. We were concerned about the impacts of climate change. Now, when I say we, at the time there were 23 former chiefs and deputy chiefs from every fire service in Australia, from some forestry and national parks fire sections, some SES commissioners, all former, because we knew that we weren't allowed to talk about that horrible thing, climate change, when we were employed by governments. It was too political.

Now, calling around to my colleagues, we were all frightened about what was coming because we were in drought, we were seeing incredible fire weather in Queensland in particular in 2018. Early 2019, there were fires starting again. So we contacted the government and said, look, you know, the fire services are begging for more money for firefighting aircraft. You're going to need to call out the Australian Defence Force. So we had practical suggestions to make to the government, they were not interested because we mentioned climate change and they were, you may recall, they were actually very childish and dismissive. We were called, I think, inner city raving lunatics and time wasters by the deputy Prime Minister.

Audio excerpt – Michael McCormack:

“That’s real leadership. Not the ravings of some Greenie in his apartment in Melbourne, crying out how terrible coal is…”

Audio excerpt – Interviewer:

Deputy Prime Minister, I’m not sure why you keep talking about Adam Bandt. I’m asking you about emergency service leaders, 22 of them…”

GREG:

And it just typified the level of that government.

Audio excerpt – Michael McCormack:

“You do get a lot of groups that put names on their titles that, quite frankly, they are a front for something else. I’m not saying this group, this particular group is, but when you are a minister…”

Audio excerpt – Interviewer:

“Then why raise that?”

GREG:

I was on the front line on fire trucks throughout New South Wales watching people lose their homes, their livelihoods and sometimes loved ones. So I'll never forget again the date 19th of December 2019, fighting fires down in the Southern Highlands and hearing that a tree had fallen on a fire truck and two young fathers had been killed, about a kilometre from where I was. And then finding out that the Prime Minister had gone on a holiday, a secret holiday overseas.

Audio excerpt – Reporter 4:

“The Prime Minister has apologised for taking an overseas holiday to Hawaii during the bushfire emergency. Scott Morrison says he deeply regrets any offence caused as he rushes back to Australia.”

GREG:

I'm sort of angry about that now. I wasn’t then, I was just upset. But I've thought about it and just thought so much could have been done and that lack of leadership and just the dismissiveness of anyone who raised concerns. But I had no idea the magnitude that the fires would end up consuming or just the number of homes, the number of lives affected. So it was a pretty sad and sorry time.

ANGE:

So, Greg, are we more prepared for this upcoming bushfire season? Have your calls been listened to this time round, after seeing what we went through?

GREG:

Thankfully, yes. We have a government in Canberra now we don't have to argue the science of climate change with. They accept that. We have an emergency management minister who is engaged, who understands the issues. They've had to restart a lot of work, because the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, implementation of the recommendations stalled under the Morrison Government. They only accepted 16 out of the 80 recommendations and left the rest to somebody else, whoever that is. So this government's decided, no, no, we take responsibility for the lot, working with states and territories. Lots of things happen, lots of practical things on the ground, like more firefighting aircraft, a new fire danger rating system. But I have to say our message, emergency leaders for climate action, people like the Climate Council, are all warning we're getting to the limits of adaptation. And what I mean by that is, Black Summer showed that on the worst days, during the worst climate fuelled fire weather, firefighters don't have a chance. We spend our time trying to save our own lives. New Year's Eve Bateman’s Bay 2019, there was a pyro convective storm above us, trees were dropping all around us and frankly, I didn't know if we would go home that day. Homes burning down all around us, I think 650 homes that day alone. And it was just horrendous. And all the fire trucks, firefighting aircraft in the world, can't deal with weather, the likes of which we saw during that Black Summer. And it's getting worse. It's going to get worse. The science is clear.

ANGE:

So if we have reached that limit of adaptation, as you've been talking about, more broadly, what can we do to limit our risk of devastating fires in the future?

GREG:

Well, thankfully, there are things we can do. So some years ago, the Australian Productivity Commission found that 97% of disaster expenditure happens after an event, cleaning up and rehousing people, emergency relief etc. Only 3% of expenditure is before the event to help people harden their homes. For example, cyclones, bushfire impact, moving people off floodplains, setting up the evacuation centres, equipment caches. So we need to shift that balance. I've seen studies where they've suggested, for every dollar spent in prevention and preparing, you can save $3-5 when an event actually occurs. So there's lots we can do.

But true resilience isn't about government agencies coming in and taking over and saving you at the last minute. Everybody needs to take responsibility for their own preparation. Today, extreme fire weather where I am, before I go off to the fire control centre, I'll be plugging my downpipes, I’ve cleaned the gutters of leaves. I'll be filling my roof gutters with water, because that's where lots of house fires start. Leaves catch fire, gets into the roof space. So it's about families knowing exactly what the risks are in their area, exactly what they need to do, having a written plan. And there's templates from the State Emergency Service, the Rural Fire Services, CFA, CFS, wherever you live, and having drills with the kids and the families, knowing what they'll do in a disaster.

ANGE:

Greg, good luck for the summer ahead and thank you so much for your time today.

GREG:

Thanks very much.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today…

The Australian Electoral Commission has issued a warning to Yes23 campaigners over their use of purple-coloured signage outside early voting booths for the referendum.

The AEC said some ‘vote yes’ posters, which use colours similar to the AEC’s own purple branding, could mislead voters about the source, and message, of the signage.

And,

Australia has registered its driest September, and the hottest on record for New South Wales and Victoria.

Australia recorded just 4.83mm of rain in September, which is more than 70 per cent below the 1961–1990 average.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back again tomorrow.

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