I experienced it firsthand,facing walls of flames raging and spreading so fast that we often had no chance of catching up. And even when we did,conditions were often so intense that it took everything just to ensure our own survival,with fire-generated storms creating conditions few firefighters had ever experienced.
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Sadly,many people didn’t make it,including fellow firefighters,and thousands of families became homeless.
Then we lurched straight from unprecedented hot,dry,windy conditions driving jaw-dropping mega-fires to flooding rains of incredible intensity. The sheer volume of extreme weather records that have fallen in the past 12 months – across Australia and globally – is shocking. From Lismore to Lahore to London,extreme weather records have been broken.
We’ve entered a frightening new era of climate-driven “unnatural disasters”. And to put it bluntly,Australia’s disaster planning,management and recovery systems are regularly overwhelmed.
On Monday,my group,Emergency Leaders for Climate Action,and the Climate Council are releasing that warns of worse to come after a succession of disasters. Emergency systems we developed in the 1990s and early 2000s simply cannot cope with the scale and ferocity of the worsening disasters being thrown at us.
Last week,NASA released a showing groundwater saturation levels above the 98th percentile for many parts of south-eastern Australia. That means if more rain falls,it will have nowhere to go.
Summer is a few days away and the emergency management community worries more shocks are just around the corner. For communities hit by this year’s great deluge,such a prospect is heartbreaking.
Our reliance on outdated risk scenarios and models caused an underestimation of risk to some communities this year,particularly in NSW. This month,the Lachlan River rose faster than anybody expected. One in five residents of Forbes and Eugowra needed to be rescued.
Earlier this year,I helped stunned residents cleaning up along the Hawkesbury River after their third major flood within 18 months. Communities were just starting to get back on their feet. These compounding disasters are becoming far more common. Terms such as “one in 1000-year event” are becoming meaningless.
The terrifying speed at which climate change is accelerating as nations blithely continue to feed the beast with emissions from burning coal,oil and gas is outstripping capabilities of emergency management systems. Fire and emergency services are regularly overwhelmed by the scale and severity of unnatural disasters.
History tells us that after widespread inland floods,massive grass fires are almost inevitable. Additionally,we’re being warned of the likelihood of heatwaves and a high chance of more tropical cyclones than usual this summer.
These are the thoughts that keep emergency service chiefs awake at night despite their exhaustion after three years of catastrophes:what’s going to happen if a cyclone hits the saturated east coast,or if massive grassfires driven by high winds and heatwaves break out and threaten flood-battered remote communities? It will be horrific.
After a decade of political denial and indifference,playing Russian roulette with climate change,Canberra is finally starting to rethink and transform our response to climate-driven disasters. But we have no time to spare.
Our emergency services need big funding boosts. We need standing arrangements to support rapid recovery after each disaster and to build community resilience. We need to embrace different ideas,including training community-first responders such as the heroes we saw in their tinnies when Lismore flooded this year.
Emergency services scrambled to cope with the number of rescues required and ultimately had to rely on spontaneous assistance from community volunteers. This is becoming more common across the world.
Underpinning all this is the urgent need for a national climate change disaster risk assessment. If we don’t know what we’re facing,we can’t possibly plan to deal with it.
It’s a matter of record that the former national government capabilities that would have allowed us to better understand what we are now facing.
Fixing this will be expensive – literally the cost of inaction. So how can we pay?
Let’s start by turning our attention to how we got here in the first place:through fossil fuels burnt by relentlessly greedy industries posting record profits while the world drowned or burnt. Through our taxes,we subsidise the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $11.6 billion each year. How they must laugh at us as they rake in billions in super profits while paying little to no income tax.
It’s time to say that we’ve had a gutful. It’s time to end fossil fuel subsidies and repurpose that money to build our emergency and disaster recovery services and support communities to become more resilient and disaster-ready. If any money is left over,it should be used to help us drive down and eliminate emissions that threaten our very existence.
Greg Mullins is a councillor with the Climate Council and founder of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action. He is the former NSW Fire and Rescue commissioner and a serving volunteer firefighter.
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