Is your community bushfire-ready? In Cobargo after black summer we don’t just have a plan, we have one another

‘Individual preparations only work because of what we have built together as a community after black summer’ … Cobargo covered in bushfire smoke in January 2020. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

As extreme heat grips large parts of Australia this week, the time for preparation is now, not when flames are visible or evacuation orders sound. The communities that survive disasters aren’t the ones with the best emergency services. They’re the ones that have built resilience before crisis strikes.

I know this from experience. My village of Cobargo on the New South Wales south coast was devastated during the black summer fires six years ago. Recently, at the SXSW conference in Sydney, I swapped experiences with Tim Cadogan, a first responder and the CEO of GoFundMe, who lost most of his home town of Altadena, California in the Los Angeles wildfires in January last year. Though thousands of miles apart, we are learning that strong recovery needs a level of community connectedness established long before crisis strikes.