I think I read that Australia currently has about 2700 active firefighters fighting the wildfires there.
There are also recently fires in the amazon, california and various other places that are going to get worse due to climate change.
So when it comes to fighting wildfires, is the issue that there aren’t enough firefighters and firefighting equipment, or is it that you really can’t stop a wildfire once it gets out of hand no matter how much funding, equipment and trained personnel you throw at it?
If the issue is the former, are there any efforts to beef up international fire fighter squads to deal with these issues? Since fires in the northern and southern hemisphere do not happen at the same time, I’m wondering if it’ll be common for firefighters from one hemisphere to be in the other hemisphere when it is winter in their home country.
Are there efforts to create more international cooperation to fight fires (again, especially considering that wildfires seem to be a summer occurrence, and when its summer in the north its winter in the south, etc).
The problem is the scope and scale of the fire events. 2700 firefighters are woefully inadequate for the fires currently happening in Australia. That number is diminished by the firefighters who have to remain on duty in population centers.
Here is the US, there are detailed plans for moving units and teams to the fires, while other teams come in behind them to cover their territory and so on. So downstream at the fire, you have an increase in resources in people, and upstream things are more spread out. We also have local, state, and federal agencies that coordinate. We even pull firefighters internationally.
I don’t know what’s in place in Australia, but I would imagine it’s similar. Perhaps one of our Australian members can add more information.
Now imagine thousands of acres burning. Even when you’re ready, it can be tremendously difficult to get fires under control, especially when it’s hot and dry. Throw in some winds to move the fire forward, and sends sparks flying in new directions, and you’ve got problems. To make things even more challenging, when fires get big enough, they generate their own weather.
Of course, in a strange sort of way, the answer to your question is also a lack of resources. In a perfect world, there would be an instant, growing-as-needed supply of fire fighters that has evolved as climate change took effect.
There’s a saying that every fire is different. Firefighting requires extensive ongoing training to learn new techniques and hone their skills. Building (at training facilities or a planned demolition sites) and brush fires can be set for training. Not so for large wildfires.
The problem is more the size/extent of the fires than issues around numbers of people and amount of equipment and/or funds.
The sorts of wildfires we see in places like California, Fort MacMurray (in Canada - parts of which continued to smolder for over a year), Australia, etc. come under the formal definitions of conflagrations or firestorms, with such features as heat sufficient to melt aluminum until it runs like water and firenados, because a regular just-air tornado isn’t apocalyptic enough. When it is said these fires “generate their own weather” what that means is the rising hot air draws in air from every direction, giving the fire more oxygen to burn hotter, and secondarily the clouds generated form lightning, which then strikes the ground around the fire setting yet more fires.
So, yeah, there are some issues there not with equipment or training or people or money but things like tornadoes of fire which combine the “ordinary” destructive forces of tornadoes with incineration, fire hot enough to melt equipment (never mind what it would do to human beings), and just the sheer extent of these blazes. Oh, and random lightning strikes.
I don’t know how the setup is in the US, but here, metropolitan fires are fought by paid firefighters, but bushfires are generally fought by volunteers. There was a an amount of political back-and-forth earlier in the fire season about the prospect of adding in paid fire crews … there was a certain amount of “well, that’s disrespectful to our dedicated volunteer service” pushing back against “yeah, but we need more resources on fires, what else do you propose?”. The defence force can get called in if it’s really bad - that’s happening now.
Oh, and of course a lot of firefighting is done by people on their own properties too. Often they’d be the same folk in the local fire crew.
Added to this, the current government has painted itself into the “bushfires are no worse than they ever were because climate change isn’t happening” corner (this is looking very shaky for them at the moment) which makes it hard for them to admit that we might not be able to keep doing things the way we’ve always been doing them.
Relations between the metropolitan fire service and the CFA (Country Firefighters Association) are not always cordial - there was a State government minister pushed out … uh … year before last, I think, in a barney over where one ended and the other started (Melbourne keeps growing like a bloated jellyfish, turning former “country” areas into urban areas)
I don’t even pretend to know what the ultimate shape of the fire service ought to look like, but any change would be very contentious because Australians have got a lot of emotional investment in our “fireys” - comparable to the way Americans feel about veterans, I think
Also, bear in mind that Australia has a lot fewer people than the US, in a land area that’s about the same as the continental US. Eastern Victoria is pretty sparsely populated, and there’s a fair bit of rough country with few or no roads. There’s a grand total of one highway in the area (Princes Highway) - and it’s two lane for most of that area, with the occasional passing lane. Have a look at the Mallacoota area - I remember reading about people being stranded on the seashore there during this last set of fires, and it’s no wonder. There’s one road out of town, a narrow two lane, and that can get cut off quite easily.
In sum, even getting to the fire area can be a real chore - not to mention getting away from the fire. Try driving trucks, dragging hoses, through the hills where there are no roads…
Add to that having fire fronts that are tens of kilometers long…well, past a certain point, you just get people out of the way, and let things burn.
Oh, and another thing I should probably point out - rural Australia is much more sparsely populated than rural America, both because we’ve just got way fewer people in general, and because we’re one of the most urbanised countries on the planet. So that really limits the pool of available young people (particularly young blokes) to get involved. And it’s young people who are leaving the bush in droves to go get work in the cities too.
This ad for volunteers is pretty iconic, and I think gives you the flavour of the sort of emotions involved in the whole issue.
the problem with wildfires couldn’t be that we adopted a policy of stockpiling the fuel source without planning on how to protect it against the inevitable natural ignition process that has existed since the dawn of time.
My search didn’t turn up the recent thread to cite but fire-fighting professionals have clearly held iclimate change, not “green tape” (environmental restrictions), responsible for massive burnoffs. And leading Aussie enviro groups have worked for fuel reduction.
Wildfires are generally carbon-neutral in the long run, but current fires load CO2 into the atmosphere much faster than uptake by vegetation, the natural carbon cycle, leading to greater heat retention and more energetic weather with stronger, hotter firestorms and stronger, colder winter storms. The pros say, this is the new normal. Are you ready?
Both Native Americans and Australian Aborigines had groups that would frequently set deliberate fires as part of hunting and land management that may well have mitigated fuel build up. The problem might be more with the “enlightened” descendants of Europeans trying to suppress ALL fire in a region rather than allowing low-level, patchy, and frequent burning to reduce fuel loads.
Being in California, and having seen my share of fires, it is quite something to see an entire mountain range on fire. When you see that, you can not help but conclude that an army of tiny humans is going to have little impact on such a conflagration. Add into it that our terrain is canyons and mountains, not areas that humans typically traverse easily in good conditions. So, it would seem that even quadrupling the number of firefighters would barely make a dent.
I’ve often wondered if we have advanced the science of fighting fires beyond chasing the front line. We have every square inch of earth mapped out with elevation points. Are we applying computer modeling of winds and topography against predicted outcome? Instead of fighting a fast building fire going up a hill should we be drenching the downside of the same hill to arrest forward motion?
From a technological standpoint we are at a place in time where a computer model could be programmed into a crew’s flight plan in real-time to stop the movement of the fire instead of stopping the fire.
I’ve also wondered why we stopped researching high pressure fire suppression. By that I mean the technology that forces water at high pressure to atomize it so it’s more efficient per volume of water. It would mean better utilization of water that has to be tankered in on the ground.
Any chance of deploying tanker aircraft? The current fires seem to be fairly close to the coast. Are they close enough that something like the CL-415 or similar could be used to load and drop seawater on the fires?
Soil salinity is a major problem in Australian agriculture. Water bombing is certainly part of the fire-reduction strategy, but I see big problems using too much in the way of seawater
Controlled burns can only happen though when the conditions are conducive to the fires not getting out of control! Australia is in the grip of a prolonged drought, and climate change has prevented the usual burns happening in the cooler months when they would normally occur.
Fire ‘season’ in eastern Aus normally doesn’t really kick off until late Jan into Feb. This season they began back in November, in the hottest year on record. And they’ve been going ever since.