TRANSCRIPT:
When Amy Blain moved to Australia from the United Kingdom, bushfires were far from her mind.
That was until she was in the midst of a fire in the New South Wales town of Bermagui in 2019.
"It was deeply distressing. We had a newborn and a 6-year-old . We'd never experienced anything like that before. We woke up at 7 in the morning and the sky was pitch black. We ended up being evacuated from there but before we left the filtration plant was out, the telecommunications were down, the sewage system was damaged, the supermarket had run out of water, it felt deeply deeply unsafe."
After being evacuated, her family drove home to Canberra.
It was there in Canberra where a disastrous fire had destroyed 500 homes and killed four people two decades earlier.
Professor David Bowman, from the University of Tasmania Fire Centre, has described the incident as a near-miss, but now he's warning much worse could lie ahead for urban Australia.
"It could have been much much worse. There were just a set of favourable circumstances that reduce what would have been a truly jaw-dropping, globally catastrophic fire event. And so the question is are we just riding on luck? We need to invest money in our interfaces to make our towns and cities safe and until we get around to doing that we're just taking a bet and we could wake up one day and realise the bet didn't pay off."
A new joint report from former Australian fire chiefs and the Climate Council has suggested it's only a matter of time until Australian cities experience a disaster of the same magnitude as the Los Angeles blazes of 2025.
Former Commissioner of Fire and Rescue New South Wales, Greg Mullins, says the areas surrounding the major cities bear close similarities to those in Los Angeles.
"We looked at places like the Blue Mountains, the central coast in New South Wales, Sydney suburbs, the Yarra Ranges, Dandenongs, Adelaide hills, Perth hills and around Hobart, and of course Canberra, and they share with Los Angeles steep wooded hills and mountains, very dense vegetation, worsening fire weather driven by climate change, and periodic days where we just have catastrophic winds and fire weather."
Professor Bowman says in some ways Australian cities appear more vulnerable than those in California.
"Sometimes we have even more extreme fire weather than California. We have a desert just like California has inland. And so that hot air coming out of the desert can come blasting out of the desert with these very strong winds, which are like the world's biggest hairdryer. And they're just gonna dry everything out."
As many as 6.9 million people in Australia are now thought to be living in fire danger zones on urban fringes.
That's an increase of more than 65 per cent since the year 2000.
Mr Mullins, who also fought the Black Summer bushfires in 2019-2020, says climate change is a huge factor in these worsening risks.
"Climate change doesn't cause fires but it leads to conditions that makes fires more intense, bigger and more frequent. The burning of coal, oil and gas is what's causing this problem and ruining our planet for our grandkids."
Amy Blain says she hopes the government can take action soon so that others don't have to face the terror she experienced.
"We've been told by the government it'll be cascading, it'll be compounding, it'll be concurrent. So we now need to see the government stopping making this worse and investing in our communities to make sure we feel safe because, at the moment, this report is deeply alarming."
All this as large parts of Australia brace for severe heat in the coming days, with senior meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology, Michael Efron, saying extreme heat warnings have been issued across parts of the ACT, southern New South Wales and eastern parts of Victoria.
"We are looking at the most significant heatwave conditions since the summer of 2019/20. Along with that, that will increase the fire danger."
