Where there’s smoke, there should be cover How smoke haze, lost bees and needy pumpkins added to lost millions this summer – and what insurance can do to help next time By Miranda Maxwell
B
Hazy days: Sydney has regularly been draped in smoke this year
42
insuranceNEWS
efore COVID-19, when toilet paper didn’t come top of consumers’ must-have lists, face masks were already a hot commodity for a very different reason: PM2.5. This stands for particulate matter that is 2.5 microns or less in width and found in the bushfire smoke which reduced visibility and caused the air to appear hazy so dramatically in January. PM2 facemasks, able to filter out these fine particles and prevent them being inhaled, were worn by many Australians for the first time as summer bushfires turned more than a fifth of Australia’s forests to ash – an unprecedented amount to burn on any continent in a single season. Air quality in Canberra and Melbourne during January made headlines for being the worst in any city in the world, inferior to New Delhi, Lahore or Beijing. Chemists and hardware stores rapidly sold out of facemasks. The catastrophic bushfires spewed around 900 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s roughly the equivalent of a year’s worth of emissions from commercial aircraft worldwide.
April/May 2020
The Medical Journal of Australia estimates that bushfire smoke was responsible for 417 deaths, 1124 hospitalisations for cardiovascular problems and 2027 for respiratory problems, as well as 1305 presentations to emergency departments with asthma. “We did not attempt to estimate health effects for which exposure–response relationships are less well characterised, such as primary health care attendances and ambulance calls,” an article posted online on March 23 says. “Our findings indicate that the smoke-related health impact was substantial. Smoke is just one of many problems that will intensify with the increasing frequency and severity of major bushfires associated with climate change.” Steven Prince, the director of Ovens Valley Insurance Brokers in Myrtleford in northeast Victoria’s Alpine Shire, was evacuated on three separate occasions as the flames
