By Nick Goldie
Following the fire in koala country
In the summer, you always keep one eye on the horizon. By the time the pager had beeped, with its message of FIRE CALL, I was on the road in the old Cat Seven fire truck. I picked up neighbors Jeremy and Ray, and we headed for the enormous plume of smoke to the north. It was bending our way, like a tree in a gale.
“We’re on the road,” we reported on the radio. “Where do you want us?”
“Just do property protection,” was the answer. “We’re not going to stop this bastard!”
We could see the flames, skipping hotly across the landscape. Flames from a grass fire reach two or three or four meters into the air, and they can travel at speeds of seventy kilometers an hour – rather faster than our old truck on a dirt road.
We turned in at the first gate. There was a line of pine trees along the drive, and the house was in a cleared area made by the circular drive, with some sheds outside the circle.
We drove the old Seven around behind the house. This was all according to the book – the house would provide some protection for the truck, while we protected the house. We rolled out two 38mm hoses, with Ray on point and Jeremy just behind him, taking the weight of the hose, while I stayed with the truck to operate the pump and listen to the radio. With the pump going, and the roar of the approaching fire, I couldn’t hear anything anyway.
A line of flame was racing towards us from the north-west. If it got into the pine trees, we’d be in trouble.
It all went according to the book. Ray and Jeremy simply stood their ground, aiming the water wherever the fire threatened to break through. It was as if an approaching train suddenly decided to split into two – one half roared around us to the right, the other to the left, and thundered away down the paddock leaving the house in an unburned island.
The sheds and outhouses were gone, of course. At one point I spotted Jeremy with a fire-hose in one hand and a singed chook under the other arm. Now and then he gave the chicken a gentle spray of cold water, then he handed the traumatized chook to the equally traumatized home-owner.
The next day the owner would have the sad task of going out with his rifle, patrolling the fence lines, dealing with the scorched sheep, and even some kangaroos, which were caught up, dying, in the wire.
Meanwhile we were following the fire. During the night it continued to the east, and into the foothills. This is steep country, with scrubby forest and vertiginous fire trails. The main fire trail runs from north to south, along the spine of the hills, and Fire Control had hopes of stopping the blaze where it would be forced to burn down-hill.
This is koala country. Everyone learns in school that koalas live on a diet of gum leaves and gum leaves only. Except that, after two hundred years of European settlement, somebody noticed that some koalas, in some places, like to chew on bark as well, and have been filmed in the act. They leave very characteristic gouges in the trunks of the young straight trees that they like, and, if you know what to look for, you can find koala scats in the leaf litter around the trees, even, with luck, spot a koala high in the canopy.
Not long ago, fire brigade maps were drawn with a thumb-nail dipped in tar, and directions to a fire were equally succinct: “There’s a gate, and a cattle-grid. You can’t miss it. Go past the water tank.”
Today, koala country is considered an environmental asset, and hazard reduction burns have carefully marked boundaries which are not to be crossed. Older locals are skeptical: “Koala bears? Better roasted anyway.” It’s not always possible to prevent a wild fire getting in amongst the koalas, but the mapping, and the science, have improved out of sight. The maps, elegant creations at 1:25000, are produced daily during a major fire by the local Fire Control Centre, one for every truck, with boundaries, sectors, water sources, even weather predictions.
Weather, nasty and nice
Weather, said WH Auden, is what nasty people are nasty about, and the nice show a common joy in observing. It’s also of fundamental importance in fire operations.
Weather is not always well understood, and there’s a great deal of weather research going on, as well as the more familiar climate research. If only we knew … consider the famous Rattlesnake Fire (1953), in which a curious weather pattern in northern California resulted in a cascade of cold air rushing through a high valley and down a mountain-side, carrying the fire with it, resulting in the deaths of one US Forest Service ranger and 14 volunteer firefighters (who were also missionaries).
The US Naval Research Laboratories are particularly interested in “pyrocumulonimbus clouds,” which may be generated by big bushfires such as the 2009 Black Saturday fires near Melbourne. These strange pillars of smoke are incandescent at the base, shoot upwards in a hot column which reaches the icy stratosphere, and then fall dramatically back to earth in a multi-directional cold wind- burst.
This is of obvious importance to firefighters, but what interest does the US Navy have? Simply that the massive amounts of soot, ash and even moisture forced up into the stratosphere may actually prevent US Navy satellites from “seeing” their targets.
According to the United Firefighters Union of Australia, “there are no climate skeptics at the end of a fire hose” but these folk are metropolitan firies, with a city view. Out in the bush, where climate skepticism is the norm, there’s a perception that climate has always changed, always will, and fighting fires is just part of the job. Being on the end of a hose doesn’t change anyone’s view of scientists, or city slickers.
Surprisingly, it is rural politicians who lead the skeptical charge, rather than their constituents. According to a Latrobe University study: “Over half of (rural) politicians contacted had difficulty regarding climate change as a neutral scientific issue because they negatively associated it with groups they felt antagonism towards such as their political opponents, environmentalists, doomsayers and fundamentalist religions.”
Political belief will always trump scientific theory, partly because science as a matter of its own methodology continues, quite correctly, to refer to “theory” rather than asserting some absolute truth.
In a recent online piece for The Conversation (January 2016) , University of Queensland researcher John Cook noted that in conservative think tanks, the denialists actually regard evidence for human-influenced climate change as part of the grand conspiracy. Can you beat that? he asks. He concludes that for people with a conspiratorial mindset, it’s natural to believe that others are involved in conspiracy too. Therefore, the evidence that climate scientists produce is itself merely evidence of a greater conspiracy.
There’s not much one can do about that. Anything you say may be used in evidence against you, especially if you are associated with (a) a union or (b) the Australian Climate Council. When the UFU quotes the Climate Council they are doubly damned: “Our bushfire preparedness is at risk from climate change as the fire seasons lengthen and overlap with the northern hemisphere. This means that fire services will be less able to share resources.”
Three things are changing. Even if you are doubtful about the science itself, the climate is measurably changing. It’s getting warmer, there are more wild weather events (bushfires and blizzards are both influenced by warming) and sea levels are rising. Secondly, there’s a demographic change, as tree-changing influences more and more mainly affluent people to move out of the suburbs into the bush. And thirdly, something is happening to the Australian tradition of volunteering. There are fewer volunteers, and they are getting older. Increasingly, volunteer fire brigades are becoming Dad’s Armies. This is perhaps good news for the Dads, but as the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research has reported, we are going to need more, not fewer, volunteers: in the tiny Australian Capital Territory, for example, almost double the present number.
In 2007, Australia’s peak scientific body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) produced a ‘climate change projection study’, which predicted increased fire weather, droughts, and extreme weather events. In 2015, the study was updated, and CSIRO’s Senior Scientist Kevin Hennessy said, grimly, that although the new paper was based on more sophisticated climate tools, there were no surprises.
“These new projections are consistent with what we said back in 2007,” he said. “One of the key findings is that in a warmer climate there’ll be more extremely high temperatures and fewer colder temperatures.”
And more, hotter, bushfires.
All this, as the tree-changers move into the countryside and the urban sprawl becomes ever more sprawled.
Climate, weather, houses, and the fire roaring
Firefighter Jeremy, whom we met at the beginning of this story, recently spent some time at the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise, Idaho. He saw new housing largely along the tops of ridgelines. “This gives the occupants a great view of the approaching fire,” he said, dryly.
The wildfires which have occurred in recent years in northern California and the north-west states have, like the blizzards in the eastern US states, been linked to global climate change. But high on the Californian authorities’ list of problems is the rash of building, mainly residential, along the forest edge and the prairie border. By all accounts, freedom reigns and “planning” is regarded as an unacceptable intrusion by Big Brother.
In Australia, or at least in New South Wales, planning permission is granted by the local shire or Council. After Melbourne’s Black Saturday, and the more recent Blue Mountains (NSW) blazes, there’s been increasing attention given to house siting and appropriate building materials.
Some years ago, I built a fully approved weatherboard house of western red cedar, with an external staircase and dormer windows. None of this would be signed off today – neither materials nor the complicated ember-trapping design. In fact, when I added a sun-room, the shire inspector insisted that the access steps be made of hardwood, with a steel frame, and that they must be on the eastern wall not the west, because most bushfires would come on the wings of a west wind.
As a firefighter, I have also recognized that it is increasingly common to hear the Incident Controller practicing a sort of triage: “don’t bother with that building – it can’t be defended’ and “don’t go down that road – there’s no way out and we don’t want you trapped!”
When the pager starts its beeping, and the little screen says FIRE CALL, you drop everything. (An SMS message will follow, on the phone, but there are still areas where the old-style pager is more reliable.)
I shout to my wife in the house: “Call out!”, struggle into my yellow overall, and head for the truck. On the way down the road I stop briefly to pick up Jeremy and his partner Sandra, both experienced firefighters. The fire is half an hour away, a lightning strike on a rugged hill near Murrumbucca, and there are several farms under threat. Once again, the instruction comes on the radio: “Just do property protection!”
There are crews from brigades all around the district. We’re given a grid reference and we find a small new farm house, with a clutter of sheds and garages. We have two trucks available, there’s a chopper overhead, and once again we do it by the book.
We park our old Cat Seven, tucked away behind the house, with the back of the truck facing the fire so that the pump-man (Sandra) can see the nozzle man. There’ll be too much noise to hear anything, but hand signals will get the message through. We run out a couple of 38mm hoses, along one side of the house, so that the nozzle man has a full length of hose to use. The second truck does the same thing, in a mirror-image operation.
Each truck has about seven precious minutes of water.
The home-owner is running up and down the verandah, moving flammables like cushions and door mats into the house, and carrying a gas bottle from the BBQ to behind the shed.
There are embers falling, and the sky is a curious purple beige. The fire is close by, just the other side of a small hill. We can hear it roaring.
The home-owner brings us each a mug of hot sweet tea.
Nick Goldie ([email protected]) has been Senior Deputy Captain, Colinton Rural Fire Brigade, NSW since 2007. He and his wife live on a kangaroo-populated 100 acre olive-growing property bordering the Murrumbidgee River. Nick has been employed as science writer and broadcaster by CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, the Australian National University (Canberra), the Bureau of Rural Science. He writes regular book reviews for the Cooma-Monaro Express.
