These bushfires are a historic event. Here is what we should learn from them

With the ongoing bushfire crisis, it is clear that we are in the middle of a historic event that will change the way we manage fire in the Australian environment.

We need to look at where and how we build houses
to withstand bushfires in a hotter and drier world.

As a bushfire protection scientist, I am mostly focused on the practical problems these major events have given rise to, what went wrong or right, how we can solve these and prepare for the future.

My personal perspective is based on working as a fire protection planner in the aftermath of the 2003 Canberra fires and the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday fires. These events resulted in significant changes to how we protect communities, which have been successful in a lot of cases. There are still several months to run in the current fire season, but we can already start to look to the big questions that we will need to answer once the fires are finally out.

We fight fires with data as much as water these days. Apps and social media are now an essential part of warning communities and coordinating evacuations. While this is an amazing capability that simply did not exist at the time of the Canberra and Victorian fires, it was clear from tweets by fire protection experts, such as Bianca Nogrady in the Blue Mountains, that our telecommunications system was being pushed to its absolute limit as people tried desperately to keep on top of where the fires were. 

Read the story from The Guardian by Cormac Farrell - “These bushfires are a historic event. Here is what we should learn from them.”