In this week’s issue of the magazine, Christine Kenneally wrote about the wildfires that ravaged Australia earlier this year. (The entire article is available online; nonsubscribers can pay to access it.) In the arid Australian climate, fires are a constant, and residents have often dealt with them by staying put and confronting the fire. But this year’s devastation—which reached its climax on February 7th, known as Black Saturday—has led many Australians to reëxamine their assumptions, and maybe even import American notions of safety and fire management. We spoke about the aftermath of Black Saturday, the impact of global warming, and how to escape a fire that can destroy an entire town.

Bruce Ackerman, one of the main subjects of your piece, is a plumber who, as the wildfire approached, rushed back to his house so he could keep it from burning down. And he did, even though he’s not a firefighter. How common is that in Australia?

The Australian ethos is that houses can be saved from bushfire if people are there to save them, and before Black Saturday this has generally been true. Bruce’s firefighting skill is not that uncommon. There’s a palpable sense of shared responsibility in the Victorian countryside, and there are tens of thousands of emergency-services volunteers. These volunteers learn a lot about fire, and they in turn educate members of their families and communities. Many volunteers end up staffing firetrucks and fighting fires themselves.

Still, I learned from Bruce that survival is not just about the skills; you need real grit to execute them in the face of terror. This turned out to be true of a surprising number of professionals and volunteers that I met while reporting.

How is the Australian approach to fighting wildfires different from the American approach?

Volunteerism is one difference. An American firefighter I spoke to in Australia said that he’d never seen so many unpaid firefighters before. Evacuation is another. Americans may be forcibly evacuated from their homes, but this doesn’t happen in Australia. I sat in on a informational session for some Americans who’d come to help out, and one of the instructors told them, “You are never to use the word ‘evacuate’ in this country. It’ll just cause panic and more death.”

The Americans in that room themselves represented another big difference. They were Burned Area Emergency Recovery (BAER) units. A collection of biologists, geologists, hydrologists, and other fire specialists, a BAER unit assesses the multitude of ways that fires affect landscapes, and suggests remedies. BAER teams have operated in the United States since the nineteen-seventies, but they have only just begun international exchanges. Their intensive focus on rehabilitation and recovery in a post-fire zone was completely new to Australia, and their ideas were received with gratitude.

Of course, the challenges that fire specialists experience in a burned or burning landscape are different in each country, too. I don’t know too much about what American firefighters need to be wary of, but in Australia, everyone in the bush must keep an eye out for poisonous spiders, European wasps, “jumping jacks” (large, yellow-jawed black ants that attack en masse and bite through protective gloves), poisonous snakes, falling eucalyptus trees (known as widowmakers, for their tendency to topple after fires), and random mine shafts sunk over a hundred years ago by gold prospectors.

How do you think Black Saturday changed things?

Much is being reëxamined here—decision-making, communication, even the science of how fires like these unfold. In addition to changes in the “stay or go policy” that I describe in the article, there has been a lot of talk about using plainer language in public-service announcements. Instead of warning that a fire could be “dangerous,” future announcements will state that “people may die.”

Less quantifiably, there has been a change in our collective sense of what’s possible. I talked to a lot of people from the Department of Sustainability and Environment. You wouldn’t guess it from the name, but these guys are the government’s firefighters. They were about as tough and knowledgeable as it gets, yet when I spoke to them in the days following Black Saturday, they all described a profound sense of shock about the speed, damage, and behavior of this fire. And if the experts were surprised, then the rest of us were much more so.

Unfortunately, there remain people who are reluctant to change.

How do people in Melbourne or Sydney see the fires? Is it something they deal with, or something that happens at a distance?

One country person I spoke to said that for the first time she felt that Melbournites understood the dangers and anxiety that country people face. There are a number of reason for this, including the fact that the line between country and city is being erased by urban sprawl. Twenty years ago, Kinglake and Strathewen—both devastated by the Black Saturday fires—used to be the kind of towns that city-dwellers moved to for a “tree-change.” But now these places are more like outer suburbs of Melbourne. I suspect that Sydney reached this point a while back. In 1994, the whole city was virtually cut off by a fire, and many homes in outer suburbs burned down.

Was global warming a factor in the Black Saturday wildfires?

Australia has a long history of big fires. Indigenous Australians are known to have used fire to hunt, to create the right conditions for seed production, and to “manage fuel loads.” Some eucalyptus forests need fire to regenerate. How the modern human impact on the landscape is contributing to recent fires is not yet known. The role of global warming will be formally examined in the months ahead by the Royal Commission’s study of all causes of the fire. So the short answer right now is “we don’t know yet.”

The long answer will surely include the fact that we seem to be breaking records all the time: record-breaking heat in the summer, record-breaking heat in the winter, record-breaking winds, and record-breaking dryness. I have also noticed in Royal Commission transcripts many unsolicited observations about how much the countryside has changed in the last twenty years. One man talked about being able to drive a tractor in the depths of winter over fields where, two decades ago, it would have gotten irretrievably bogged down.

It seems as though a record drought helped make the fires worse, and Australia has been forced to seriously restrict personal water use. Where are they going to get water in the future?

Plans are afoot in Victoria for a massive desalination plant. Additionally, a north-south pipeline that diverts water from country rivers and brings it to the city is currently under construction. It’s said the pipeline won’t deprive farmers and residents in areas where the water is diverted, but environmental activists argue that both the pipe and the plant will do more damage than good. Now a lot of people use double-flush toilets and water-efficient shower heads, and even in the inner city many have rain tanks on their roofs. One of my friends harvests used water from her washing machine for her garden. Of course, we are all encouraged to use less than a hundred and fifty-five liters per person per day. This may sound like a lot of water, but if you shower for seven minutes with an inefficient showerhead, you could use almost a hundred liters of water. If Melbourne is forced to move to the next level of water restrictions, there will be no outside watering (not gardens, sports grounds, cars) at any time. Somewhat miraculously, over the last three weeks we have had completely unexpected heavy rain. A few of Melbourne’s smaller reservoirs are full for the first time in years and years. This is unlikely to change the long-term future, but it buys us some time right now.