Comment

Greg Mullins
Cities aren’t safe from the next firestorm

As we face these fires in Victoria, there is deep apprehension among my colleagues in emergency services. We are not just worried about today. Victoria’s most savage fire weather often arrives later in summer, when heat, wind and dry fuels combust. It is only mid January, and yet, across the Wimmera, North Central and other districts, fires have already torn through farms, forests and towns.

Media reports state more than 500 structures have been destroyed and more than 400,000 hectares have burnt. A life has been lost and communities are reeling. Many people have spent the week breathing bushfire smoke.

Firefighters are worried about what the rest of this summer can deliver. We are already looking at next summer with apprehension.

We are in a cycle of climate whiplash.

Wet periods drive prolific growth of fire fuels and stop burn-offs. Then heat returns, curing that growth into tinder. Heatwaves are now hotter and the atmosphere more volatile – swings from extreme wet to extreme dry are sharper. If rain does not arrive when it is needed, the fuel loads waiting for the following summer can become almost explosive, turning landscapes into tinderboxes.

History tells us the worst often comes in February, so more dangerous weeks may still be ahead. Science tells us this danger isn’t going away. This week, new data from Europe’s leading climate agency showed 2025 was the third-hottest year on record, and that the past 11 years have been the 11 hottest ever documented. Climate pollution from coal, oil and gas pours fuel on the flames.

Sprawling cities and regional centres where suburbs border bush and grassland are increasingly at risk of dangerous fires that move faster, throw embers further and hit harder.

Just days before these fires swept across Victoria, the Climate Council and former chiefs from every fire service in Australia released the report “When Cities Burn: Could the LA fires happen here?” One year on from those urban fires, the study shows the same deadly combination that overwhelmed Los Angeles can also line up in Australia: climate whiplash, heavy fuel loads and destructive winds.

What happened in Los Angeles should have shattered any lingering myth that cities are free from bushfire risk. LA is a wealthy, well-resourced city with thousands of professional firefighters. It was still overwhelmed. Why? Cyclonic winds, hills and dry fuels, all lining up at once. A massive firefighting response was outpaced by wind-driven fire.

In Australia we have already seen days when fire weather becomes so extreme that emergency services must shift from fighting fire to solely saving lives.

I’ve spent more than 50 years as a firefighter. Over that time, I’ve watched the risks climb ever higher, threatening where Australians live, work and raise their families.

I’ve seen fire stop behaving like fire and start behaving like a storm. When a fire gets intense enough, it can generate its own weather. Sometimes it builds into a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, or pyroCb, which can create fire thunderstorms or tornadoes.

A firestorm can throw embers many kilometres ahead of the main front. It can generate lightning that starts new fires. It can create violent winds that make conditions unsafe and force firefighters to retreat. Not just “hot weather”, but dangerous fire behaviour that can overwhelm crews and communities.

What frightens firefighters most, though, is losing the night. Temperatures used to drop when the sun went down, humidity lifted and the fires we were fighting would ease. Those precious hours were a chance to cut containment lines, back-burn, protect homes and rest crews.

Now, on too many nights, the fire doesn’t “lay down”. The air is thirstier. It draws moisture out of leaves, bark and grass around the clock. Fuels stay primed. Fire behaviour stays aggressive.

In Canberra in 2003, fire tore into suburbs with a brutality Australians still remember. The 2019-20 Black Summer did the same on a larger scale, across whole regions.

For decades, events like this were rare. We used to treat them as outliers, or “black swans”, but now they are turning up more often. The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements heard that a “flock of black swans” descended in 2019-20.

As Australians we need to be honest about where we live. Almost seven million Australians now live on the urban interface, the thin green line where suburbs meet bush and grasslands. In Melbourne and Perth, those outer suburban populations have surged by about 111 per cent since the early 2000s. More people now live in places where a bad fire day can quickly transform into a disaster.

Vulnerability is built into our streets. Up to 90 per cent of homes in high-risk fire zones were built before modern bushfire standards came into effect in 2009. Many have unprotected vents, timber decks and gaps under eaves that act like entry doors for embers.

People imagine walls of flame as the main threat. Often, it’s embers. Burning fragments pushed by wind into roof cavities, under decks, through vents, into leaf litter in gutters. A house can be fully engulfed in 10 minutes.

Once a home ignites in a dense suburb, the danger multiplies. Radiant heat breaks windows and ignites furnishings. Spot fires jump fences. One burning building becomes the ignition source for those on either side. Houses become the fuel.

That is how you can lose hundreds of homes in a single run of wind-driven fire. Not only bushland burning, but suburbs burning.

If the mounting physical danger does not move our political leaders, the financial reality should.

Insurance companies are not waiting for another royal commission or inquiry. They are pricing risk into the premiums we all pay, right now. Across bushfire-prone parts of Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, home insurance premiums have risen dramatically in recent years – some have more than doubled since 2020. People are discovering their “forever home” has become a financial black hole.

This is how so many will start feeling the climate crisis. Not in abstract charts but in rising insurance renewal notices, with higher excesses and more exclusions. Families will begin agonising over whether they can afford to protect their largest asset.

When insurance cover disappears for a property or becomes unaffordable, there are flow-on impacts on mortgages and property values, making recovery harder after disaster. That is the road to uninsurable suburbs. Who will pay those rising costs?

Fossil fuel corporations are making plenty of money as fire disasters mount. Continued climate pollution from coal, oil and gas has ensured worsening fire weather. Hotter conditions dry fuels faster. Fire seasons lengthen, opportunities to do hazard-reduction burns decrease and the chance of high fire danger increases. Meanwhile, the likes of Santos and Woodside Energy are recording billions of dollars in profits.

So what do we do?

We must stop pretending we can simply “firefight” our way out of this. Firefighters are highly skilled, but we are not magicians. When fire danger hits catastrophic levels, if fires take hold, we can often do little to protect homes and businesses. We concentrate on our highest priority: saving lives.

We can’t put a fire engine on every corner – and on the worst days, fires will break out in many different places. While we strive to improve our emergency services – and should continue to do so – the climate-driven threat continues to outpace us.

First, we must cut climate pollution more swiftly. Move away from polluting coal, oil and gas. Accelerate clean electricity, storage and electrification so households and industry can cut climate pollution and their bills. Treat climate solutions as protection, because that is what they are.

Second, we must make homes and suburbs more climate resilient. Retrofit vulnerable housing in high-risk zones: ember-proof vents, seal gaps, upgrade doors and windows and keep gutters clear. Make sure planning rules reflect today’s fire reality, not yesterday’s.

Third, we must keep communities insurable. Invest in risk reduction including hazard reduction in the narrowing windows of suitable weather. Improve disclosure so buyers and renters are not blindsided. Make sure the cost of inaction is not dumped on households.

None of this is impossible. What we have lacked is urgency and the political courage to stand up to the fossil fuel interests that profit while the public pays.

We can no longer afford the luxury of thinking bushfires are someone else’s problem. If you can see trees from your kitchen window, if you live near grassland, if you live on the edge of a growing city, you are closer to the frontline than you think. Plus, bushfires anywhere mean insurance goes up everywhere.

The LA fire disaster offered a blueprint for what urban fire can look like, and with February still ahead, the calendar is telling us we may not have seen the worst of this Australian fire season yet.

Fossil fuels have supercharged the climate, driving dangerous bushfire weather and other climate extremes. Every tonne of climate pollution makes my grandkids’ future grimmer. Every minute we delay is a minute we lose in the race to protect our homes, our communities and our kids’ futures.

We have the evidence. We have the solutions. The only question left is how swiftly we choose to act before the next firestorm hits our streets.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 17, 2026 as "We fear the summers to come".

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