As fire danger heightens in the Illawarra, the University of Wollongong’s Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires (CERMB) director, Associate Professor Owen Price, is concerned that the community is ill-prepared.
Established in 2006 through funding from the NSW Rural Fire Service, the centre conducts research that aims to better recognise and quantify bushfire risks, and ways to reduce these risks. It provides independent advice on improvements to fire management policy, planning and operations.
Owen Price joined UOW’s Bushfire Centre in 2007 under the directorship of world-leading fire ecologist Emeritus Professor Ross Bradstock, who handed over the reins in 2020.
After relocating to Darwin with his Australian partner in 1992, the UK-born ecologist spent 13 years working for Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife Commission, where he grew fascinated by the effects of fire on the environment.
“I worked for the Northern Territory government in wildlife research, and when you work up there in wildlife, everything has a fire element to it because most places burn every two or three years,” Owen said.
“There’s always a question of how do fires affect this thing or that thing? And, so, I sort of gravitated to always having a fire element.
“But I suppose as I've gone on, I just began to realise just how important it is that we do these kinds of research, to have an evidence base to the way that we manage the risk. Bushfire is an enormous risk and we've got to do it right.”
That risk became reality four years ago, when fire ravaged 24 million hectares, killed 33 people and three billion animals during Australia’s ‘Black Summer’.
In the wake of the devastation, as the government’s post-fire data become available, CERMB began identifying the areas, communities and animal species most impacted, and providing advice on reducing risks.
The findings most intriguing to the centre, Owen says, were that non-owner-occupied homes belonging to people of higher socioeconomic status – such as holiday homes – were most vulnerable to destruction, yet people of lower socioeconomic status were more likely to be affected by bushfire, and that more prescribed burning in the lead up to the fires would likely have had little impact on the fires’ ferocity.
“Our centre did quite a lot of work in the immediate aftermath, trying to work out what the causes were and what the contributing factors were and where the impacts were most felt,” Owen said.
“We gave 19 short reports to the New South Wales inquiry, and they really used that as a sort of backbone for some of their recommendations.
“We're trying to work out who was most affected, and it turns out that people in lower socioeconomic circumstances were more likely to be affected, more likely to be inside the fire, than people who were better off. But one of the strange things is that we found that in terms of house loss, it was more likely the better-off people that lost houses rather than the less well-off.
“We found that in terms of fuel management – and this is one of the things we do quite a lot of research on – it didn't make a great deal of difference in terms of the overall outcome, so had there been more prescribed burning done, it wouldn't have made much difference. It probably would've made a difference in particular places… but not in the overall picture.”
It’s still unclear why the Illawarra’s bushland was spared the fate of other New South Wales forests during the Black Summer bushfires, Owen says. And while we aren’t in the midst of record-breaking drought like we were at this time in 2019, winter’s abnormal lack of rain coupled with the long respite between bushfires makes the Illawarra particularly vulnerable this summer.
“We're not in that state now, but as every week goes past and there's still no rain, the outlook looks worse and worse,” Owen said.
“The problem is we haven't had major fires in the Illawarra for a long time – 1968 was the year that it was really bad, that year the whole escarpment burned up… and that could happen again.
“I think we are going to have some fires… but a lot depends on what happens in the next month or six weeks with rain.”
When asked if the community is prepared to face an extreme bushfire season, Owen says no.
“People who live in these fire-prone places are aware of the risk, but they're not aware of just how risky it is, and most people don't take the necessary steps to prepare, so the general answer is probably no, we're not prepared,” he said.
“There's only so much you can reduce the risk by intervening in the landscape; you're not ever going to stop fires from occurring, and you can do all the amount of prescribed burning or thinning and stuff like that that you can, and it's still not going to stop them.
“The best reduction in risk you can do is people taking care of their own houses and gardens.”
Owen says people should take the advice of the Rural Fire Service – clean up gardens and lawns to manage potential fuel and remove combustible items from inside and around the house.
“If you go to the Rural Fire Service, there's plenty of advice and booklets about what you should do,” Owen said.
“If everybody did what they recommend, then we'd be in a much better state.
“Of all the levers that we can pull to try and reduce the impact of fire under a climate change scenario, I think it’s… what people do in our own houses [that’s] the thing that we can do most about – it’s the thing that can really bring us up to face the risk.”
For more advice on how to best protect your home this bushfire season, see the RFS website.