It’s Time for a National Remote Area Firefighting Team

Featured image above: significant lightning hit much of Tasmania recently on 12 March, with 19,060 ground strikes recorded.
So far, 16 new bushfires have been identified, with most not yet contained.

Lutruwita / Tasmania has suffered through a bad fire season, with lightning strikes causing major blazes in February and March.

We know that human-caused climate changes are increasing the risk of dangerous wildfires in many regions of the world, including Tasmania and that this is linked to longer warm periods, changes in rainfall and increased incidence of dry lightning. Professor David Bowman, a fire scientist at the University of Tasmania, has said that an increasingly drier climate in traditionally wet locations is increasing the risk of fire sparked by dry lightning.

This in turn is leading to more fires starting in remote areas, with obvious negative impacts on fire sensitive native vegetation and landscapes, tourism and local economic activity. This was demonstrated this summer, with a section of the Overland Track being burnt in a peak walking period, forcing the closure of the track and the destruction of one of the private huts owned by a trekking company.

As a volunteer firefighter living in central Victoria, I love my annual autumn walk in Tasmania after a long summer. Last year it was wonderfully wet on the west coast, but 2025 is more consistent with the new reality of climate change with new fire starts in recent days and dry and warm conditions across much of the state.

The fires this summer highlight the fact that all states and territories rely on each other in bad seasons to halt small fires before they turn into landscape scale blazes.

Career and volunteer firefighters and air crews from Tasmania did a brilliant job of tackling the fires. They were also supported by interstate remote area firefighting crews. This is how we fight fires now days: with interstate and sometimes international support. For instance during our Black Summer fires, more than 1,000 people came to Australia from North America to assist us in our firefighting efforts.

Long fire seasons stretch local resources, and sometimes remote areas need to be abandoned in order to focus on defending human assets. Having an additional, mobile national team that could be deployed quickly to areas of greatest need would help us protect the wonderful legacy of national parks and World Heritage Areas that exist across the country. For Tasmania these areas have vast ecological value and also underpin much of the state’s economy.

We know that increasingly remote area crews are being used to protect fire sensitive vegetation (for instance the Wollemi pines in the Blue Mountains or Gondwanic vegetation in Tasmania). During the 2020 fires, firefighters were deployed on the ground to defend the only known natural grove of the world-famous Wollemi pines, in a remote part of the Blue Mountains. Fire crews were dropped into the area to operate an irrigation system that was set up to protect the trees.

Recently prominent researchers in lutruwita/ Tasmania argued that as wildfires increase in severity and frequency as a result of climate change, that Australian authorities will need to adopt a landscape scale plan to protect old trees in the way that land managers are doing in the USA. They note that fires in 2003, 2010, 2012, 2016 and 2019, mostly ‘ignited by lightning storms under drought conditions, destroyed 17 of the world’s largest eucalypts. In these circumstances, individual stands of important trees can be protected provided suitably trained personnel are available’.

And this summer, the devastating fires experienced in the centre and west of Tasmania highlighted the need to have remote area crews. Andrew Darby, writing in The Guardian, quotes Richard Dakin, the deputy incident controller with the National Parks and Wildlife Service:

NSW fire service large air tankers dropped a 2.5km fire-retardant line; water bombers campaigned from the lakes; and remote firefighters worked at arduous, grimy ‘old-school’ firefighting, flailing and digging at the perimeter. “The combination of the three led to success.”

It is clear that we will need more specialist remote area crews who are able to carry out this sort of protection work as well as first strike response when lightning strikes cause fires across large areas of land. While the states and territories are responsible for funding local remote area teams and volunteer teams, there is a role for the federal government in establishing a national team.

As fire increasingly threatens World Heritage Areas and high conservation areas within national parks across the country, it is time to establish a national remote area firefighting team, which would be tasked with supporting existing crews in the states and territories.

This was recommended by a Senate inquiry after the devastating fires in Tasmania of 2016. This inquiry looked at ‘responses to, and lessons learnt from, the January and February 2016 bushfires in remote Tasmanian wilderness’ and was chaired by Greens Senator Nick McKim. A key recommendation in the report – see recommendations at further down this page – is the proposal that the state and federal governments should investigate the establishment of a national remote area firefighting team (although Coalition committee members dissented to this).

Almost a decade on from the terrible fires of 2016, surely it is time to get on with implementing this sensible idea: creating a national remote area firefighting team which could be tasked with assisting local crews when remote and precious sections of the conservation estate are threatened by wild fire.

Cam Walker is campaigns co-ordinator with environmental group Friends of the Earth and lives in central Victoria. He is an active volunteer firefighter and can be followed on Bluesky and Instagram.

Featured image above: significant lightning hit much of Tasmania yesterday, with 19,060 ground strikes recorded. So far, 16 new bushfires have been identified, with most not yet contained.

Report excerpt – Senate Standing Committee on Environment and Communications, 8 December 2016

Responses to, and lessons learnt from, the January and February 2016 bushfires in remote Tasmanian wilderness – List of recommendations