Australia braces for another ferocious fire season
Date: 09-Sep-02
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: Michael Christie
Officials said last week they were bracing for a possible re-run of the ferocious bushfires that licked at the outskirts of Sydney, Australia's largest city, after Christmas last year and some fear this season could be far worse.
In New South Wales, the island continent's most populous state, the formal bushfire danger period and the fire bans that come with it were imposed in August in the north and began in the south on September 1, compared with October in more normal times.
"It is the first time that the entire eastern strip has been brought into the bushfire danger period this early," New South Wales Emergency Services Minister Bob Debus said in a statement.
"All the signs are that we are up for another challenging bushfire season."
FIRES ALREADY BURNING
In New South Wales, flames are already threatening the lush rainforest of the World Heritage-listed Mount Warning National Park near the state's northern border with Queensland.
In the north of South Australia, fires that raged for a week before being brought under control scorched one million hectares of grass and farmland, wiping out valuable feed stock.
New South Wales Rural Fire Service spokesman Cameron Wade said having fires begin early on the northern coast was not unusual. But the number of fires and their ferocity was.
"Temperature has not played a part in the fires at all so what we're looking at in the summer is adding temperatures to that equation and that's looking like a fairly bad mix," he said.
South Australia Country Fire Service spokesman Matthew Bowman said the state had not yet declared the bushfire danger period open ahead of its normal starting date in November.
"If we don't get a fairly considerable amount of rain quite soon then it's very likely the starting date will be brought forward," Bowman said.
The fires that consumed 770,000 hectares and destroyed 109 houses around Sydney last Christmas were among the worst ever seen. The fire service says it saved at least 20,000 homes.
But last year was a perfectly normal year in terms of temperatures and rainfall.
This year, more than 80 percent of New South Wales is in the grip of a fierce drought and Sydney has had its third driest southern hemisphere winter since records began in 1900.
The drought is being aggravated by the El Nino weather event, a cyclical warming of the Pacific associated with a lack of rainfall in eastern Australia and floods in Latin America.
The bulk of bushfires are caused by man, either deliberately or by accident, and firebugs have also been given notice.
Wade said the New South Wales fire service had increased its number of fire investigators by 43 to 83.
"We're now taking the fire investigation role extremely seriously and virtually every fire of suspicious nature or that we can't determine the cause of, we investigate," he said.
