To Ken, the recent spate of bushfires has not come as a surprise. The recent bushfires, which ravaged every state in the country, started earlier than had happened before. There are records of fires starting July last year. But by September there were dangerous outbreaks in south-eastern Qld that soon moved to northern New South Wales. While some media commentators insisted that this was taking us by surprise, Ken reminds us that science has been warning of this for at least thirty years. Were these fires different from what we’ve encountered in the past? According to Ken, yes. “They were unstoppable and way off the scale” he notes. “There is normally a scale of 1-100 with 100 being catastrophic. The recent fires on the south coast registered over 200 on the same scale. Nothing like that has ever been experienced before”. “There was a new scale release recently after catastrophic fires in Victoria and now there will have to be another to deal with what we’ve seen this summer” he says, “There was a lot of fuel on the ground but to reduce that fuel is incredibly difficult”. Hazard reduction, part of the firefighters “tool
kit” is effective, he says, but it is a dangerous tool and has to be used very carefully. “You can’t use hazard reduction burning during the fire season and the fire season is getting longer and longer”, Ken notes. We are told that this recent fire season started in July in Port Macquarie. “There is no hope of doing hazard reduction burning under those conditions and there is now a much shorter time to do hazard reduction burning. Now the time frame is down to three, maybe four months and even during that period, the conditions have to be perfect or it becomes too dangerous. The time frame is becoming smaller and smaller, allowing fuel to build up on the ground”, Ken says. Now, with climate change, with the temperatures increasing, this situation is becoming worse. The winds are stronger, the grounds are drier, the soil moisture content is decreasing. Increased CO2 leads to the growth in vegetation and when vegetation dries out the fuel loads increase. “It’s not one particular thing, it’s a combination of things and you must look at all of these to understand.” Ken has said the he found the discussion about hazard reduction
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and back burning a distraction. He also believes it is a politically driven distraction and is amazed at how quickly some of our politicians became experts in firefighting and land management. “Their ignorance was exposed by their use of the wrong words to describe what was happening”, he told me. “They were talking about back burning when what they meant was controlled burning. Controlled burning is burning in front of the fire and again, extremely dangerous and must be used very carefully and the conditions were not right for it. These fires were so intense they were destroying everything in their path.” Military people that Ken Thompson knows said the destruction, loss of life and habitat was worse than some of the war zones they’d been in. Ken says it’s a conservative estimate to say that a billion native animals have been lost. And then there is livestock. Did the level of ignorance concerning the fires surprise or disappoint Ken? “On the political level it did because modern science has known about this for 30 years. The United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change first started its research then.
