Plenty Still Left To Burn After Fire Shattered Australia's South Coast; Residents Bracing For Summer
By this time last year, I had already written my first bush fire story of the season — with a headline that called the destruction of the Binna Burra Lodge an omen of the future. Now, watching another round of unprecedented blazes destroy the American West, I’m reminded of all the interviews I did with scientists who have been telling the public for decades that climate change will make the worst fires hotter, bigger and more frequent.
They were right. They are still right. And the consequences, like clouds of smoke, reach further and linger longer than most of us would have imagined. That’s one of the things I took away from a recent trip to the South Coast for a story about preparations for another fire season. What I found was that — in an area where you can’t drive more than a few minutes without seeing blackened trees — any thoughts of the future are being colored by the recent past.
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“There’s heightened anxiety about fire in the community,” he said. “We’re trying to explain to people that this year is different. By this time last year, we were already chasing fires.” But for many, the landscape will never look quite the same again. “There’s still a lot of fuel around,” resident after resident told me. Downed trees, dead and ready to combust. Swaths of forest that escaped the fires last year, sitting near vulnerable homes. Even grasses now look like sparks for bigger blazes.
And the intense focus on the land has upended human relationships too. There are more arguments in families and among neighbors. There are friends who have simply left for good without saying goodbye, their fears, sadness or losses getting the best of them. No one seems to have much faith in the government either, especially when it comes to climate change, which the country’s leaders continue to shrink from discussing like mumbling teenagers asked about overdue homework.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/19/world/australia/fire-lessons-south-coast.html
