Bushfires then and now │ The Science of Disasters with Ilan Kelman

What ingenious ways did indigenous people use to deal with bushfires in the ancient past? Were the fires so bad thousands of years ago? Stay with me, Ilan Kelman, to find out what's behind Australia's wildfire destruction in the latest episode of our series, The Science of Disasters.

In Australia, wildfires or forest fires are usually called bushfires. The country has good reasons to fear these flames. The Ash Wednesday fires of 16 February 1983 took just 12 hours to kill 75 people across two states, South Australia and Victoria. Tasmania lost 62 people to the Black Tuesday fires of 7th February 1967. The most lethal Australian bushfire disaster so far occurred exactly 42 years later on 7th February 2009, or Black Saturday: 173 people died.

But is the bushfire the actual disaster? Must we stop the flames because we cannot avoid or escape them? Or are there other factors at play making the bushfires merely one ingredient within the recipe which then produces all that death and destruction? Understanding bushfire disasters is not straightforward because it is about human society interaction, again showing how vulnerabilities rather than hazards cause disasters.

Indigenous Australians managed fires for tens of thousands of years. They set controlled burns to alter the environment for maintaining tracks, trapping animals, and avoiding the build-up of burnable fuel which could lead to large conflagrations. Over time, indigenous practices adapted the ecosystems to support plant species which could survive low-intensity bushfires, actually using the fire to propagate.

Fire was part of land use and land management integrated into human needs, among other environmental adjustments, although we do not really know how many fire disasters the indigenous Australians might have caused, nor how many of them perished in the flames. Europeans then imported and imposed a different perspective of bushfires. Flames were presumed always to be dangerous and damaging, so they were suppressed and fought. As settlements expanded into the wilderness, fires indeed became highly destructive and lethal, reinforcing this combat mode.

The fires of 2019 and 2020 continue this pattern. Despite the heatwave before and during the major fires, and despite the fire's intensity and extent, plenty could and should have been done over the long term to avoid the witnessed catastrophe. Over past decades, cities and towns have expanded significantly into burnable areas. This is a choice and there are advantages of living closer to and within nature: cleaner air, recreational sites on your doorstep, and less noise and less light pollution. Often suburbs encroaching into the bush provide larger houses and gardens for those dwelling there, which is a lifestyle preference.

Homeowners can do plenty to stop their property catching alight, even as the land around them blazes, by designing and maintaining their houses and land to reduce the chance of them burning during a bushfire: clear brush and debris, clean gutters and eaves so that embers falling there do not set fire to material in them, trim the grass, thin out limbs and branches from trees and rip out vegetation that encroaches close to the house, select plants and vegetation for the garden which do not burn well, and do not build or store flammable items by the house, such as porches, decks or log piles, and on and on.

No guarantees ever exist of saving property, but we have seen the difference in Australia during the 2019-2020 fire season between those whose dwellings survived and those who sadly lost everything or tragically perished whilst staying behind to defend their homes. The key is preparing years in advance, including being ready to lose one's home knowing that fires are part of the ecosystem and could happen every year, even if they are now more intense and expanding in range due to human-caused climate change. The fundamental cause of the Australian bushfire disasters was creating vulnerability to the environment, no matter what the fire hazard does.

We know about tsunamis before they happen, so why can't we save more lives? Join me, Ilan Kelman, to find out in the next episode of The Science of Disasters.

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