The scene that greeted me stepping out of the house in an Australian suburb
One week ago I was stood on a suburban Australian street in the middle of the day watching a huge plume of smoke spread across the sky. I wasn’t the only one. Several people were on their driveways hypnotically gazing as the black cloud grew and grew.
After two weeks of watching the devastation almost five months of bushfires had wrought on the eastern side of Australia, now in this small town on the other side of the continent I was getting a small taste of what they had experienced.
Evacuees were sat in a nearby cafe, leaving after receiving a text that they needed to go. Other customers, the waiter confided, had rushed back to home to rescue belongings in case the fire ventured near to where they lived. The freeway was immediately closed and an emergency warning was put in place. Helicopters criss-crossed the sky, each dropping a bucket of water to dowse the flames in what appeared to be a well-practiced routine. It was bushfire season after all.
This was my first experience of being near a fire of this scale and the thing that struck me was not the flames but the smoke. The acrid smell of burning was everywhere, still lingering in the air, clinging to everything it comes in contact with. It was hard to breathe and unpleasant to be outdoors. Hours later, while going outside to check my phone, small fragments of ash landed on the handset despite now having travelled more than 50 kilometres from the source of the fire. Smoke haze hung over Perth Airport, obscuring the landscape as darkness fell. It was all encompassing.
And, while is was a large bushfire fuelled by strong winds, that took around 150 firefighters to control, it is not even close to the scale of the bushfires in eastern Australia that have been raging since September 2019. The New South Wales Rural Fire Services has described the damage as “unprecedented” in the state at this point in the bushfire season. To watch those relentless daily images of people’s homes destroyed and reports of lives lost was heartbreaking. But, for me, the most iconic image broadcast during my time there were helicopter shots of kangaroos fleeing for their lives as the flames chased them.
There was talk of government’s, both state and central, not doing enough to prevent the fires with controlled burning to clear out low lying flammable material. Witnesses, however, report many fires spreading via the treetops, bone dry from a lack of rain and scorching temperatures. Residents and firefighters alike have said these are different types of fire than the ones they are used to.
Links with changes to the global climate could mean that more and more people will lose their homes, the environment that surrounds them and even their lives to the flames and toxic after effects. After having a small taste of being near a bushfire, it is not an experience I would like to repeat in a hurry.