It’s been a difficult February in western Victoria. On February 13, dry lightning sparked a blaze in the Grampians, fanned by high temperatures and 70km northerlies. A bushfire broke out near the dam at Bellfield, which then roared down the forested slopes to engulf the picturesque village of Pomonal. Forty-four homes were lost and five firefighters were injured when their truck was burned over by 30-metre-high flames. Heroic efforts by the CFA saved Pomonal’s school, corner store and historic church, but the small town has been devastated.
Last Thursday was another hot day with strong northerlies. A fire broke out neat the farming hamlet of Warrak. It soon burned into the dense forest of Mount Cole and Mount Buangor, a beautiful area popular with hikers and naturalists. By Thursday afternoon, the fire was threatening Beaufort, a town of 2,000, which was rapidly evacuated. The fire is still going and has burned nearly 20,000 hectares, some of it pristine snow gum forest around the renowned Beeripmo trail.
Like a lot of city slickers, I moved to the country to escape the Melbourne pandemic lockdown, so this was my first experience of a major fire. The experience was cinematic and terrifying.
From her schoolyard, my five-year-old daughter could see the massive plume billowing kilometres in the sky. Her teacher’s house was threatened while her best friend’s farm was evacuated. Thursday’s school pick-up was chaotic, with parents arriving straight from evacuating their properties, animals and key possessions in the back of their utes.
Utilising my journalist’s privilege, I was able to get close to the fireground on Thursday. With the Western Highway closed, it was possible to walk up to the highway overpasses near Buangor. From there, I could see the scale of the conflagration. Smoke wreathed the 1,000m high Mount Buangor, sending a plume of pyrocumulus high into the sky. The fire had burned up and over two mountains, sending embers 10 kilometres east to attack the small town of Beaufort, while dozens of dry lightning strikes started spot fires downwind of the blaze.
Away to my right, flames were visible up on the last hill before Beaufort, as helicopters and cargo planes dropped water. Several CFA trucks roared past, firefighters in the back with their heads buried in maps. I sent a photo to my friend, the environmental writer Tom Doig. “I mean, it’s very beautiful”, he wrote, “in that purely apocalypse-y way”. Welcome to the Anthropocene, I thought.
Premier Jacinta Allen arrived for a media conference on the Thursday after the Pomonal fire, promising all the usual messages of relief and reconstruction. Locals are sceptical. While a bushfire can mean a short-term injection of disaster relief funding, after a couple of months the grants run out and the bureaucrats with clipboards return to Melbourne.
Despite the grumbles, Victoria has learnt from Black Saturday. The warnings are better: the information available from the VicEmergency app is timely and fine-grained.
Resources are better coordinated and incident control appears to have benefited from better planning and training. On Thursday there were more than 1,000 firefighters and 100 trucks deployed in the effort to save Beaufort.
Prime Minster Albanese told reporters on Sunday that “it’s a reminder of the need for us to be vigilant, for us to continue to work and act on the threat that is climate change, with an increased number of extreme weather events and increased intensity of those events”.
But in the longer term, it’s hard to argue that Australia is properly prepared for the ever-growing scale of climate-induced natural disasters. Although federal Emergency Management Minister Murray Watt has made a start on better national preparedness, most of our funding and effort continue to be poured into acute responses like flood rescue and firefighting, rather than longer-term planning for things like drier forests, rising waters and vanishing coastlines. At $1 billion, and disbursing just $200 million a year, current funding for the Commonwealth’s Disaster Ready Fund is inadequate to the task of mitigation.
Policies are one thing, but delivering on the ground is another. The dismal recovery effort in Lismore, where residents are still without homes years after the devastating floods, shows that federal and state government capacity to rebuild shattered communities remains inadequate.
Australia may well be on the brink of a major insurance crisis. As Crikey’s Bernard Keane noted last week, our big insurers are highly concentrated and extremely profitable. But for ordinary consumers, insurance is getting more expensive and harder to obtain. In the wake of repeated natural disasters, insurers can simply leave the marketplace altogether, as we’ve seen in the United States, where insuring a home in riskier areas of Florida or California is becoming impossible. Northern Australia may be heading the same way.
Over the weekend, the writer Jessie Cole penned a poignant essay for Guardian Australia about the constant threat of floods in northern New South Wales. “In northern NSW”, she writes, “flood-PTSD is rife.”
Also on the weekend, the farming hamlet of Willaura held their annual “Farm to Pub” fun run. The aim was to raise money for One Red Tree, the local mental health non-profit. But local fun runs are not going to raise enough money to properly fund mental health services in regional communities, especially as more and more of them are affected by traumatic natural disasters. The regional hospital board is in deficit. There aren’t enough health services, especially for mental health. It can take months to get an appointment with a GP.
Country communities are used to natural disasters, but that doesn’t mean they’re not keenly felt. Even when no lives are lost, homes and farms are destroyed, and livelihoods are affected. It doesn’t take long for conversations at the front bar or the local café to turn to the fear of further fire. Wednesday is going to be hot again: authorities are forecasting another day of “catastrophic” weather.
On top of all these disasters how can our governments keep on permitting NEW coal, gas and fracking? Thank you, Ben. I hope you and your surrounds manage to get through tomorrow.
…. If enough of us keep voting primarily for parties not prepared to make the hard decisions …..
The problem as I see it Klewso, is what choice is there?
I keep voting Labour as I think they are slightly better than Lib/National, but keep finding myself disappointed. the Greens (My Senate vote)
seem to be all over the place and ill coordinated, also Media coverage of them is so negative that its hard to know the facts.
The policies outlined by all three Majors seem to be pipedreams with no actual belief or intent. So where to vote.
Independents, yes, but so little chance for them in the face of Media attack. Then if by a miracle elected not much power in parliament, due to party hack numbers.
The “Teals” are making a reasonable showing albeit Liberal in appearance, but I think a “City” phenomena.
Here in rural Vic the Nat party hold the seat by a 17% majority and seem unshakable despite a total lack of benefit for the community.
An example being, roads as we refer to our local goat tracks. Road repairs consist of putting up a sign saying “Caution road hazard ahead”
and leaving it at that.
Discuss this with locals and point out that, with the Nats margin being so high there is no way either the Libs or Lab. will “waste” money in the area so why not try for an independent? Standard answer, “he (the local member) is a great bloke”.
Can you find any solutions K, or anyone?
I’d like to keep the blowflies from settling. In for a term, if they don’t measure up, out they go, but you need critical (in two senses) mass for that.
The Greens are going through an identity crises. On the one hand you have the genuine backbone of the party rooted in the environmentalist movement who realise you can’t deal with environmental degradation by slapping up a few wind turbines. Then you have the truly cognitively impaired people like the Greens housing spokesperson who wants better outcomes for housing while refusing to except the reality that pumping the population is incompatible with all the Greens stated objectives. But their populist rhetoric will get them more votes and maybe a few extra seats so they’re going to run with it. We have only one true environmental party in Australian politics, and it’s not the Greens.
We face a lot of hurdles on that, Klewso. Media companies whose entire existence is predicated on perpetuating the myth that global warming isn’t happening, fossil fuel companies deep into state capture, a large chunk of an aging population who keep buckets of sand in their homes for burying their heads in, and an Opposition who would sacrifice their own children to get into power. A lot of over-fifties don’t think, don’t want to think, and believe that thinking is for losers and commies. That’s a hell of a voting population to try and reach. (By the way, I’m over fifty, before the righteous begin typing their PC righteousness about agism, stereotyping, etcetera).
There’s no plan. For the cost of a nuclear sub we could have a safe and efficient means of locating a fire as it begins and dispatching the means of putting it out before it spreads. “Catastrophic” only means we can’t put it out with the current resources.
In WA we have devastating fires caused entirely by lack of maintenance on grid infrastructure. The Telstra towers have no battery back-up, so a fire cuts communications. Because Telstra doesn’t fight fires, and Western Power doesn’t fight fires, they do nothing to avoid the consequences of fire, or to avoid starting them. Fires here are put out by local farmers, volunteers. There’s no serious plan to avoid starting a fire and no serious plan to put one out asap. We have one of the world’s biggest forests – in which fire is allowed to run free, to its destruction. “Oh well, that’s Australia for you, and there is a thing called climate change, you know”. So we’re all victims, and if you aren’t a victim yet you will be fairly soon. In this case not so much a victim of the climate, or “Australia”, but of our politicians – who don’t understand what national security actually is. It begins at home.
I’ve said for years that NSW could learn a lot from the VicEmergency App and I still stand by it.
I ended up rezoning my Watch List to a minute radius due to the ridiculous notifications I was receiving every few minutes – all of which as soon as they’re clicked on (within actual seconds if that) bring up a response of “incident resolved 10/15….(whatever ) minutes ago”.
In the 2019-20 Bushfire hell, the app was just as useless where we lived at the time, surrounded by fire.
At least Victoria has learnt its lessons.
NSW??? Yeah Nah….Not in my lifetime.
Living on the NSW Far South Coast, only 350 metres from the beach, we were told by the local RFS that our locality could not and thus would not be defended in the terrible fires of 2019-20. So we evacuated with both cars and a trailer full of stuff we could never replace, ie official documents, photos and artwork, to Melbourne where it could be safely stored until it was safe to return. When the BOM forecast an El Nino for this summer, we repeated the process, but have been relieved to live through a wet summer. Means we should now have about 9 months of freedom from fear of fires.
Keeping in mind, too, that the kind of climate extremes we are seeing now are coming from global warming of somewhere between 1 and 1.5 C. If all of the new fossil fuel projects that Labor has approved are brought on-stream, we are looking at an increase considerably greater than what has happened so far. In other words, extreme events are only going to get more extreme, more frequently, which is what the climate scientists have been saying for decades.
We are already seeing considerable areas of Australia becoming uninsurable. At some point ‘uninsurable’ becomes ‘uninhabitable’ in practical terms: there are only so many times an average person can afford to rebuild after being burnt or flooded out if the insurance companies can’t or won’t stump up with a payout. What happens then?