The CSIRO has unveiled a new $2.1 million research facility in Canberra aimed at helping firefighters and other authorities better understand and predict bushfire behaviour.
Fire expert Andrew Sullivan said the ultimate goal of the National Bushfire Behaviour Research laboratory was to help Australians "live with fire".
"We can't remove fire as a threat to the landscape but everyone at every level needs to understand what it means to live in Australia and live with bushfires," Dr Sullivan said.
Building on bushfire knowledge
To do that, Dr Sullivan and researchers at CSIRO's Black Mountain campus utilise the Pyrotron – a 29-metre-long combustion and wind tunnel designed to investigate flame propagation with different kinds of fuel.
The device is filled with leaf litter or other debris which can be cooled or heated to change its moisture content and temperature and then ignited to test fire behaviour or to experiment with different fire retardant materials.
The laboratory also has a vertical wind tunnel for studying the combustion and aerodynamic characteristics of embers formed by burning bark and other materials.
Dr Sullivan said the apparatus allowed them to conduct experiments in environments with a level of control that could not be achieved outdoors.
"We can control any one particular variable, such as wind speed, and look at how varying that variable — and controlling all the others – influences the behaviour and spread of that bushfire," he said.
"The objective of the work that we do here is to build our knowledge of bushfires so that the rural management agencies and rural fire authorities ... and the general public are able to prepare for and respond to major bushfire events.
"The major outcome from the work that we do here is numerical models for predicting the behaviour and spread of fires that can be used for predicting where a particular fire is going to spread, so the authorities can issue warnings to communities that might be under threat."
Collaboration is key
Disasters like the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 not only claim lives and cause extensive damage to the environment, but also have serious economic impacts.
And, while the $2.1 million spend on the laboratory pales in comparison the multi-billion-dollar cost of bushfires, the CSIRO's chief executive Larry Marshall says money is not the key factor in mitigating risks.
"National challenges can't really be solved by any one organisation," Dr Marshall said.
"As a country, we don't collaborate as effectively as we could."
Dr Marshall said "one of the few good things that came out of COVID" was that Australian researchers learned to collaborate in a way they hadn't before.
"That delivered vaccines in a record time, it stopped Australia running out of critical PPE [personal protective equipment] for frontline medical responders, because we figured out how to invent it and manufacture it here domestically in record time," he said.
