The normal cycle of bushfires and flooding rains has been upended leaving emergency services with little respite

This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

Queensland remains so dry that thunderstorms forecast for the weekend could bring lighting but no rain – a potential spark for more bushfires but no relief from the fire crisis gripping two states.

Fire conditions on Thursday gave emergency services workers a brief respite and the chance to build stronger containment lines around many of the 75 bushfires still burning across the state.

But the weekend forecast is grim: dry storms and a heatwave in the south east of the state. The Bureau of Meteorology says ongoing dry conditions that have fuelled the recent fires could continue for months in Queensland.

“The main story with these storms could be the dry lightning potentially igniting further fires,” BoM national operations leader Richard Wardle told reporters in Brisbane on Thursday.

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“In terms of the longer-range outlook for rainfall it is looking like it’s going to stay dry. We’ve had a very dry 2019 and we expect those very dry conditions to continue until 2020.”

The unprecedented scale of the fires and the likely extension of the fire season is worrying for authorities in a state where the onset of summer typically sees emergency services workers pivot to readiness for cyclone and flood events.

“In Queensland we normally shift fairly seamlessly from bushfires into flooding rains or storms and cyclones,” says Lee Johnson, the former commissioner of the Queensland Fire and Emergency Service.

Johnson said emergency workers in Queensland were flexible and had the capacity to handle a range of hazards. But as the seasons begin to extend and overlap, offering little respite, the state’s former fire chief says he has some concern for the capacity of exhausted personnel to respond.

“It’s not so much the capability of the organisation, it’s the capacity. This fire season has been a marathon and not a sprint. It increasingly looks like the wet seasons that we’re used to aren’t coming, and then we end up with events like the flooding in Townsville.

“What we’ve got to be conscious of is exhaustion. Many of the people involved, they’re all volunteers. We do as a nation place a great deal of responsibility onto volunteers in these circumstances and we’ve got to be conscious of how they’re utilised.”

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“There is no end in sight for the dire conditions. There’s no decent rain forecast until probably January, February next year. That looks like extending our fire season right into summer which is not normal. And for this week and the coming week, there’s no immediate end in sight.

“No doubt the problem is heightened. The next question is are we organised for the big unknown event, the event that is still to come.”

Andrew Gissing, a risk management expert and researcher with the Bushfires and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre, last month published a note that compared suburbs with the highest risk of natural disaster.

The findings picked areas like Bundaberg in Queensland and Grafton in New South Wales – both near where fires have raged in the past week – as among the most at risk. The principal threat in those places was from flooding, not fire.

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Gissing says that bushfires make up 12% of normalised losses from natural disasters in Australia. He said that meant work to mitigate the risk, rather than a focus on how emergency services respond to events, would be a critical step.

“We tend to plan and focus on the last major disaster rather than really investing where the evidence lies.

“We could have a season this summer like last summer, where we we started with bushfires and heatwaves and it turned into the monsoonal flooding in Townsville and right through northern Queensland.”

“It’s not cost effective to have standing armies on hand ready to go. Government needs to spend its efforts on mitigation to reduce the risk.”