Terrible day the bushfire textbook was rewritten

failures in 2003 is now becoming normal due to climate change.

TWENTY years ago, we saw things that none of us ever expected to see.

Canberra’s emergency managers –every one of us – felt uniquely helpless on that day. Despite our best efforts – despite our training – despite our equipment, we lost over 500 homes in one afternoon. Four lives were lost and hundreds injured.

The subsequent enquiries sought to direct blame. If we had the people, if we had the training, if we had the equipment, why was the outcome so bad? It had to be someone at fault.

The loose ends were never brought together. Many involved on that day were left in limbo.

“How could that have happened” they ask themselves – still to this day. I have heard them ask this in recent years in Sydney, in Launceston and in Canada.

I was the planning officer for the Incident Management Team.

I am also a scientist. I kicked off a scientific endeavour that is still going strong today.

Having retired recently from ESA, I am now an adjunct professor at UNSW Canberra – a local campus with a legacy of bushfire science spanning many decades.

We discovered the major cause of damaging blow-up fires globally – by looking at fire behaviour around Mount Coree. We documented the first ever fire tornado event – an F2 tornado that ran from Mount Coree into Kambah.

We have worked with collaborators on many things. Low oxygen burning produced purple flames and surface flows of ember storms, seen by many on the edge of Weston Creek. After being contacted by the US Naval Research Laboratories in Washington DC, we focused on fire thunderstorms. Twenty years ago, these clouds, called pyroCbs for short, were a rarity in Australia.

In three hours we saw vast pyroCbs from the Broken Cart Fire, the Stockyard Spur Fire, the Bendora Fire and from the McIntyre’s Hut Fire.

This was close to the most intense fire activity ever recorded – globally. We saw a black sky in the afternoon, we saw pyrogenic lightning and we saw black hail.

Day turns into night as the bushfire looms on January 18, 2003… “There is a compelling case that our 2003 fires are the most scientifically important wildfires ever,” says Rick McRae.

If a fire is doing things new to science, if a fire is disrupting 15,000 cubic kilometres of the atmosphere, and being photographed by astronauts in the International Space Station, if a fire has a power equal to almost half the global electricity generating power, if a fire is releas - ing energy equivalent to the 1989 Newcastle Earthquake, then you cannot do much with a crewed fleet of fire trucks, however well resourced.

The 2003 fires validated the Nuclear Winter Hypothesis. What was novel in Australia in 2003 has now happened in eastern Australia in 2006, in 2009, and during Black Summer, as well as in Tasmania and in WA.

What was seen by the coroner as outcomes arising from operational

We came perilously close to a repeat right here in early February, 2020. Had the rain been delayed by a week, the outcome may have been inevitable and unthinkable. The novelty of what we went through in 2003 has been experienced afresh in recent years in Portugal, Bolivia and Kazakhstan.

There is a compelling case that our 2003 fires are the most scientifically important wildfires ever, producing learnings of global importance.

From that perspective, January 18, 2003, is a day that we should remember as the day when more than a thousand homes were saved from an unimaginable fire by our emergency services and by our community –working together.

The tragic losses must be remembered and learned from. But we Canberrans – along with the rest of the planet – are facing unimaginable climate change impacts and we must get on to the front foot to adapt to this. This memorial is a fitting foundation for us to do that.

Rick McRae is an adjunct professor with the Bushfire Research Group at the School of Science, UNSW Canberra. He contributes to a website that updates aspects of the 2003 fires at highfirerisk.com.au/