Lessons learned from Australia's wildfires

The bushfires in Australia, of which I've written in the past couple of days, continue to burn, and the death toll continues to rise. As I write these words, it stands at 181, and police have warned that it may rise steeply as they enter areas that they've been unable to reach until now. A final total of 300 or more is apparently feared.

There are also important lessons being learned. People died through doing exactly what they had been told to do - horrifying evidence that even the authorities hadn't read the situation rightly.

The head of the New South Wales fire brigades has commented on this.

MILLIONS of people living near bushland can no longer expect emergency workers to save them in the face of ferocious megafires, the head of the NSW Fire Brigades has said.

"We can't be the safety net all the time. Our resources are stretched and we won't be there," said its Commissioner, Greg Mullins, yesterday.

He said lessons would be learnt from Victoria's experience and added to the strategies he and other other international fire chiefs discussed after firestorms in California and Canberra, and the Sydney 2001 bushfires.

"If this is the way of the future - savage winds, high temperatures and low humidity - it is clear it is going to get worse and it is going to take all levels of the community and government and agencies to work together," he said.

Firefighters' two biggest enemies are complacency and a lack of knowledge in the community but, as fires become bigger and more destructive through the effects of climate change, people must become more self-sufficient, he said.

"You must prepare. You must cut the bush back from your home. It's not good [enough] to think if there is a fire down the road: 'I think I'll go now.' It's emerging a lot in Victoria died leaving in cars and on foot."

In an early lesson from Victoria, Mr Mullins said NSW fire services were considering using SMS warnings - for which the technology is already available - and asking TV and radio stations to play an emergency warning siren weekly so that people become familiar with it and will respond quickly when there is a fire.

"In Queensland, radio stations play it regularly as a test cyclone warning. We haven't done it for fire mainly because we don't want people to panic and evacuate. We are now thinking we might need to get people used to it," he said.

Mr Mullins did not think anyone could have prepared for the scale of the Victorian situation, but said that he hoped it would be a "huge wake-up call" to people who were complacent about their own preparations for possible fires, especially in metropolitan bushland areas.

"I'm concerned as the commissioner of the urban fire service in the state that we see over and over that people are gobsmacked at the speed of bushfire and have made no preparations. You ask: 'Did you get the messages?' and they say yes, but they didn't think it would happen to them in suburbia."

New tankers with special spray systems to protect tyres and fuel tanks plus reflective foil curtains which pull over glass areas, introduced by Australian brigades after extensive research, performed well in the Victorian fires.

Flames had passed over two or three tankers and no one had been hurt, he said.

. . .

[The NSW Rural Fire Service commissioner] Shane Fitzsimmons ... said it would be "improper and insensitive" to draw too many conclusions so early after the fires, but the best scientific research and experience available indicated that the home was the safest place of refuge during fire, and fleeing at the last minute was the most dangerous choice.

However, many of the 1.4 million homes on the "bushland interface" in NSW would not be able to be built today if the state's bushfire planning regulations, toughened five years ago, were applied today, he said.

Important words, for us to heed in other parts of the world as well. God forbid we should ever be in such a disaster: but if we are, we can at least learn from the tragedy presently engulfing Victoria.

Peter