Black Christmas: In Australia, a year-end wildfire destroyed homes, killed wildlife and burned nearly 2 million acres. The effects—and what to do next—are still being decided

American Forests, Summer, 2002 by David Halperin

As the long days of Australia's hot summer crept towards Christmas 2001, park rangers, firefighters, and people living in wooded areas listened to the weather forecasts with growing dread.

Usually the southern hemisphere's summer months, which are December, January, and February, bring frequent soaking rains. But at the end of last year, rainfall in the large eastern state of New South Wales was well below average--up to 90 percent lower in some areas--and the widespread woods and heath-lands were tinder-dry.

By the last week of the year the mercury was spiking to more than 100 degrees Farenheit with gale force winds, the classic weather for buslifires, as wildfires in Australia are called, On Christmas day the first flames broke out, and within hours bushfires were burning up and down the eastern part of the state.

Twenty-two exhausting days later, when the weather changed and the last blazes were finally brought under control, 170 homes and more than 200 sheds, shops, and apartments had been destroyed; dozens of cars, trailers, and boats; many head of livestock; and countless wild animals.

But 15,000 other structures had been saved and no lives lost among residents or the army of volunteer and professional firefighters and support staff from around the country who had been battling the flames. They were feted with a ticker-tape parade down the main street of Sydney.

The Christmas 2001 outbreak was to become the worst bushfire episode in the state's history, with more than 900 fires, nearly 2,000 miles of fire perimeter, and more than 1.86 million acres of forest and shrubland burned. City outskirts were damaged, and the fire situation dominated every news report and every conversation.

Bushfires are no rarity in Australia. About the size of the United States' lower 48, it is arguably the driest continent on earth and its climates range from mediterranean' through subtropical to tropical. And while much of the central and western areas of the country are sparsely populated desert or semi-desert, much of the southern and eastern seaboard is wooded.

In the latest fires, as in ones that hit Sydney, the country's largest city, in 1994, sunny skies over the city were smeared with a dull red layer of smoke, producing an eerie light like an eclipse. Plumes of smoke stretched 200 miles out over the Pacific. Sydney's air pollution was the worst ever recorded, forcing some flights to be diverted to other cities and causing breathing problems for asthmatics.

One air traveler reported, "as soon as we were over the northern edge of Sydney I could only see a blanket of brown smoke as far as the eye could see." Roads were closed, and big flakes of ash and burned leaves rained down on urban backyards and gardens. In many suburbs, the flames glowed on the horizon at night.

An unexpected side effect, also seen in Australia after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Phillipines, was a series of brilliant smoke-induced sunsets.

HOW THEY HAPPEN

Bushfires caused by lightning strikes have always happened in Australia, but human activity has greatly increased their frequency, starting with the first Aboriginal settlers who arrived 40,000 years ago from southeast Asia. Some scientists believe that they radically transformed the landscape by using fire as a hunting tool.

But Aboriginal population densities were quite low. Today, 214 years after the arrival of Europeans, almost 85 percent of the country's nearly 20 million people live on just 1 percent of the land--around the coasts and in the cities. Strangely enough for such a big, empty country, Australia is one of the most urbanized nations on earth, and that has put constantly increasing pressure on the environment around the built-up areas.

Through carelessness or maliciousness, many of Australia's bushfires are caused by humans. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, 154 of last summer's fires were started by individuals. Of these, 20 were accidental and the remainder either deliberately lit or still under investigation.

While some people are starting fires, others are trying to prevent them. As in other areas of the world suffering from high fire risk, Australian authorities--the National Parks and Wildlife Service, the Rural Fire Service and others--carry out fire prevention and hazard reduction activities. These range from cutting access trails and firebreaks to early forecasting of dangerous weather conditions, closing parks and forests at high risk times, and imposing total fire bans.

DIVERSE ECOSYSTEMS

New South Wales is a big state, averaging about 550 miles from north to south, and it contains a wide range of ecosystems along its eastern seaboard, where the fires occurred. Much of the region is rocky, and plant cover includes coastal heath, dry open sclerophyll, or woody-leaved, shrublands, tall forests, and some small pockets of rainforest.

Eucalypts (commonly known here as gums) dominate almost everywhere. Australia has hundreds of species that thrive in almost every ecological niche from arid savannah to moist rainforest to snow-clad mountain. Most are tall, nondeciduous softwoods with pale smooth bark and foliage that's light, sparse, and usually blue-green. In some varieties the thin, dry leaves contain a volatile oil that evaporates in hot weather. This oil, suspended in the air, creates the bluish haze that gives the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney, scene of many of the 2001-2002 fires, their name.