Australia’s fire season has begun, early and ominously

The warmest winter on record, followed by an unusually warm and dry spring. Hundreds of fires are burning along Australia’s east coast, including one that razed 53 homes in Queensland. And last week on the west coast, a raging fire just over eight miles from Perth city center was sparked by an unusually early heatwave and high winds.

On Sunday, firefighters had brought the fire in Perth under control, which had destroyed 1,800 hectares (about 4,500 acres), destroyed 18 homes and forced dozens of homes to evacuate.

It’s not yet summer, but fire season is in full swing in Australia, in the latest example of how climate change is altering the rhythms of life on Earth. Fueled by the El Niño weather pattern, it is the first dry and hot year since the Black Summer of 2019-2020. This is expected to be the worst fire season since that period, when nearly 500 people died from direct exposure to fire and smoke inhalation, and tens of thousands of hectares were charred.

“We are only scratching the surface of what caused the fire, and we have already had hundreds of fires since early October,” Western Australia Emergency Services Minister Stephen Dawson said on Friday.

Many experts predict a difficult summer.

“All the diagnostics tell us we are in dangerous territory,” said David Bowman, professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania. Current conditions are more like a late summer month like February, he said.

Authorities and experts do not believe this summer will be as bad as the Black Summer because it is preceded by years of rain and floods rather than drought. And they say the country is better prepared, with improved coordination between agencies and more resources for firefighters. Communities devastated during the Black Summer spent years equipping themselves.

But what level of preparation is sufficient if climate change leads to more intense and unpredictable extreme weather events? Scientists say everyone from authorities to ordinary people is struggling to answer this question.

On Wednesday evening, Debra Edmonds, 54, received a stressful surprise when her apartment, in a residential block on the outskirts of Perth, the country’s fourth-largest city, was issued an evacuation order as the bushfire broke out nearby.

“When you live in a suburb, you just don’t expect a forest fire to come over you,” she said Friday, adding that she grew up in the area.

Her experience highlights a concern many experts have: how the combination of urban sprawl and increasingly intense, climate-driven fires is putting more residents at risk.

Ms Edmonds spent the night at a relative’s home and was able to return the next day when the threat was reduced. But she went home changed. “Before, it was never something that crossed your mind,” she said. “And now I am very well prepared for it.”

Such a mental shift, while helpful, may not be enough, as the past becomes less useful for anticipating what lies ahead.

The conditions Australia is seeing illustrate how climate change is making fires more unpredictable and firefighting more difficult, said the University of Tasmania’s Mr Bowman.

Firefighters in some states struggled to complete preventative burning as climate change reduced the time they had to work, he said. And in some areas, vegetation that thrived after years of heavy rain has dried out incredibly quickly.

“There are all these things that are changing: this sudden increase in fuel loads after La Niña, everything drying out because of El Niño, summer weather in the spring, astronomical climate overshoots,” Mr. Bowman said.

He said fires in Queensland were already showing unusual behavior in late October, such as burning heavily all night instead of weakening as normally happens when temperatures drop and humidity rises. It was an indication of how intensely dry the area was, he said, warning that the country would continue to exhibit unusual fire behavior in the coming months.

“The fire history that we depended on to understand, make decisions and prepare is now all changing as a result of climate change,” said Jason Sharples, professor and director of the University of New South’s bushfire research group Wales. “The knowledge we had based on the historical events will not necessarily be a good guide.”

Some of the fires the country has already seen have happened earlier and were more intense than normal, he said, part of a broader trend “towards more extreme fires” on both coasts.

Australia has invested heavily in firefighting aircraft, he said, after recognizing that with fire seasons expected to last longer worldwide, the country can no longer rely on loans from places like the United States and Canada during their winters.

And firefighters and experts are reevaluating “the traditional tactics that we would have used to suppress fires” as wildfires became more extreme, Mr. Sharples said, often “to the stage where it is literally just not safe for firefighters to to try to evict them.”

Even people who thought they were prepared for the coming summer have been caught off guard.

When Michele Eckersley and Andrew Lawson bought property near Bawley Point on the New South Wales south coast, in the east of the country, in 2022, they were aware of the fire risk. The area had been devastated by the Black Summer, and they had seen vegetation flourish under heavy rains, only to dry out in recent months.

They installed a sprinkler system on top of the house and took time in October and November to further secure their home, including replacing the deck with fireproof wood.

What they didn’t expect was that on October 1 – just a month after the end of winter – a fire would break out, destroying about half of the land on their property.

“We thought we had time,” Ms. Eckersley, 60, said.

“Everything has changed,” Mr Lawson, 62, added. “It’s changing so quickly.”