Last week, people living around Darwin and Brisbane could see and smell the smoke in the air. It’s an experience that will be mirrored across the country in the coming weeks as fire authorities and land managers carry out hundreds of controlled burns.
Climate change has already lengthened Australia’s fire seasons, with higher temperatures driving an increase in riskier fire weather.
And with the landscape full of fuel after three wet La Niña summers, the risk of severe bushfires may rise if the predicted El Niño is realised, bringing hot and dry conditions.
“It’s uncharted territory if we get a big El Niño,” says Greg Mullins, the former New South Wales fire commissioner. The three years of wet weather has also meant three years of reduced hazard reduction burning, he says.
Mullins was volunteering as a deputy incident controller for a planned hazard reduction burn last week across 400 hectares of Ku-ring-gai Chase national park, north of Sydney.
Hazard reduction burns can take place in forest understorey, grasslands and savannahs. Land managers and fire authorities prioritise areas close to communities or known spots where large fires can start, including along roadsides where the risks of accidental ignition from the public are highest.
But authorities also need the right weather – not too windy, not too hot and not too wet.
“As soon as you have a weather window, you jump on it,” says Mullins. “The windows for hazard reduction are much shorter now, because the hot weather starts earlier.
“Whenever there’s an opportunity you’re going to find national parks, fire services will all be out there burning whatever they can.”
In New South Wales, the Rural Fire Service (NSW RFS) and partner agencies have managed 58,591 hectares of controlled burns since last July to protect 93,523 properties – just 20% of what was proposed.
But 33,000 of those hectares were burned in the last month. Last week, 6,876 hectares of burns were earmarked around the Blue Mountains, Tenterfield, Coffs Harbour, the far south coast and Gunnedah.
“People won’t have been smelling the smoke for the last few years,” says Inspector Ben Shepherd, of the NSW RFS. “But as soon as opportunities present, we need to get in there ahead of the next fire season.”
“We know reducing the fuel reduces the intensity of bushfires,” he says.
Some areas targeted for burns are close to urban areas and inevitably the smoke affects people, he says, although steps are taken to reduce exposure.
Smoke from controlled burns can be terrifying for Australia’s 2.7 million asthma sufferers.
“Bushfire smoke has high concentrations of small particles that travel into airways and trigger a response. The airways narrow,” says Michele Goldman, the chief executive of Asthma Australia.
“That’s a pretty frightening experience for a young child, an older person or anyone with asthma.”
‘We just want people to be ready’
As well as a possible El Niño, climate models suggest the Indian Ocean could enter a phase in coming months that raises the chances of drier weather for much of the country.
The bushfires of 2019-20 came after years of intense drought. Mullins and Shepherd say they do not expect another black summer this year because of the amount of moisture still in soils and plants.
“We’re not coming out of drought, but we also don’t want people to underestimate the potential for fires. We just want people to be ready,” Shepherd says.
Last week Brisbane woke to smoke haze after controlled burns in a section of the D’Aguilar national park on the city’s outskirts. The state’s fire season generally starts in August – earlier than southern states.
James Haig, the executive manager for bushfire mitigation at the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services, says he has been talking to Bureau of Meteorology forecasters “several times a day” to find windows for burning.
“If we’ve got the chance of an El Niño then I’ve been encouraging our partners to seize the window of opportunity, because you don’t know what you are going to get. These windows can close very quickly.”
Haig says firefighters accept that fire seasons are worsening.
In Victoria, Alen Slijepcevic, the deputy chief fire officer at the Country Fire Authority, says the state has already conducted half its planned burns for this calendar year, but it is too early to know how much extra fuel will be in the landscape when the fire season starts around the end of August.
But changing fire seasons mean firefighters and agencies “are more reactive most of the time” and have less time to take breaks.
“It’s now a 12-month business, whereas in the past it was a six-month job for firies,” Slijepcevic says. “The evidence shows the fire season is 56 days longer in Victoria than it was 30 or 40 years ago.”
In South Australia, the Country Fire Service says it is too early to know what summer might bring, but fuel is accumulating, particularly in the Adelaide Hills.
In Tasmania, early autumn is usually the best time for burning, with more predictable weather, enough dryness and atmospheric conditions that help smoke rise and disperse.
Jeremy Smith, the acting chief officer at Tasmania Fire Service, says: “The wet conditions in the eastern half of Tasmania have driven extraordinary growth in some of the state’s highest bushfire risk areas, increasing fuel loads and bushfire risk.”
With drier conditions forecast, the fuel growth could lead to “above normal fire potential in some areas” in spring. If an El Niño were to form, this could extend into summer, Smith says.
Last week, the Australian and New Zealand national council for fire and emergency services released its bushfire outlook for the winter showing large parts of the central Northern Territory were already facing increased fire risk.
Nathaniel Staniford, acting senior fire management officer at Bushfires NT, says La Niña years have left “huge amounts of grass” that landholders are trying to reduce with controlled burns.
In Western Australia, planned burns usually occur from April to November in the south of the state and from March to June in the north. But rainfall there has been relatively average for the past three years, with La Niña having less of an impact.
