Authorities planning for 'hazardous' bushfire season
Fire authorities and other NSW agencies are stepping up preparations for what's feared to be a hazardous bushfire season. A state-wide test exercise is underway, simulating bushfire scenarios and firefighting systems.
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00:00 There's a lot of concern about what lies ahead in the coming months. We've come off the back
00:06 of three, a triple dip La Nina, three back to back wet seasons, floods, long heavy rain,
00:13 record amounts of rainfall has led to prolific growth of vegetation. And it's just now getting
00:19 into the stage where we're getting into a dry weather system and a potential El Nino,
00:24 which is really creating some hazardous conditions potentially. It's only taking even in areas
00:29 where it's quite green at the moment, might only be a couple of frosty conditions. It
00:35 dries off really quickly and that creates the environment for fast moving grass fires.
00:41 There's particularly concern about Northern New South Wales, everywhere from the Northern
00:45 New England area to the Northern rivers where many people will remember only last year we
00:50 were experiencing catastrophic floods and now we're going back into a bushfire ready
00:56 mindset here. There's also concern about parts of Sydney where the bushfires didn't burn
01:02 during the black summer of 2019-20. But even those areas that were affected by bushfires
01:08 could actually come under threat once again. We've seen already quite a large level of
01:13 undergrowth come up from some of those bushfire affected areas. Now the Rural Fire Service
01:18 says this isn't about scaring the public or making them unnecessarily worried, but it's
01:24 just simply a case of moving them from having that mindset of floods and rain to now thinking
01:31 about bushfires and how they can be best prepared. We're seeing certainly a different risk than
01:38 we've seen for the last few years. This is obviously the biggest risk that we have seen
01:41 since the 2019-20 fire season and we want to make sure that this state is ready to deal
01:47 with whatever comes our way. So Gavin, what does this test exercise involve?
01:54 It's pretty involved. Exercise Alinta it's called. It's got about 120 people involved.
02:00 Many of them are behind me here in the Rural Fire Service headquarters. And it's not just
02:05 RFS people. You've got any number of agencies, Environment Protection Authority, Health,
02:11 Education, National Parks and even the Department of Defence are running through a number of
02:16 simulated scenarios that mimic real-life bushfire situations. They're testing everything from
02:22 warning and communication systems and how they communicate within agencies, all the
02:28 way to things like deploying firefighters, aircraft. And they're also testing a number
02:34 of new technologies they didn't have in the last bushfire season. We're talking things
02:38 like satellite monitoring systems where they can actually detect very early on where bushfires
02:44 are igniting and they can get in early to prevent it from spreading further. And there's
02:49 even going to be some early sort of iterations of artificial intelligence, though some of
02:55 that technology won't be fully in place for this summer.
02:59 And Gavin, what else is being done to prepare for this looming bushfire season?
03:03 Well, at the moment, the priority really is hazard reduction burns. Given there's so much
03:09 fuel across the state, it's so prolific at the moment. But the priority really is getting
03:16 that under control. And they've got hazard reduction burn, a huge backlog of hazard reductions
03:21 to do because it's just been so wet. They haven't been able to get out there on the
03:25 ground and burn some of this fuel off. Even in recent weeks, they've tried to conduct
03:30 a number of large-scale hazard reductions and it's simply been too wet. But that is
03:34 changing quite quickly now. We're seeing patches of New South Wales becoming dry quickly. They're
03:40 trying to get in early before it gets too hot and do some hazard reductions. Though
03:44 there is also a lot of work around getting equipment ready, recruiting people, and the
03:51 fire authorities say they are quite confident they're prepared for what's to come.
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