Publications
Partners
THE fire began on the 11th floor of the 25-story Joelma Building in downtown São Paulo, Brazil, on February 1 1974. As the flames spread upward, people fled onto the roof, where a helicopter tried and failed to rescue them.
Forty people jumped from the building – none of them survived.
Many years later, I saw a video of this fire in a short-term insurance training session. Our group, wide-eyed with shock, watched the smashed bodies being carried away by emergency service personnel. I’ve had a horror of fire ever since – in my house, you are welcome to smoke, but I soak the stompies in water before they get thrown away.
Fire has been the theme of recent days, hasn’t it? It was particularly awful watching the Garden Route burn – I have friends there and have spent a lot of time in the region on work assignments. The Grenfell Towers fire brought back powerful memories of the Joelma fire.
And now Portugal… 64 people dying such terrible deaths, at least 30 of them incinerated in their cars, fleeing the wrath of the forest fires that engulfed Pedrógão Grande.
Of course the causes of wild fires are multiple, not as easy to identify as the cause of a tower block fire. In the case of Portugal, ‘dry thunderstorms' (thunder and lightning but no rain) have been blamed; so have the alien eucalyptus trees in the area, which, like the native pine trees, are highly flammable.
At the time, the area was in the grip of a heatwave that sent temperatures soaring past 40° C, very conducive to fires.
A heatwave and drought were implicated in the massive wild fires which ravaged Russia in 2010, destroying about a third of its wheat harvest that year (and, incidentally, pushing up global food prices and helping trigger the Arab Spring). The smoke/smog from these fires, along with the heatwave, killed an estimated 56 000 people.
Wild fire is not a bad thing, it’s a natural event with which our land has evolved – South Africa is, as one scientist once put it, a country shaped by fire, with about 70% of our ecosystems adapted to fire. Fires sweep across the grasslands every winter and are essential to the regeneration of fynbos in the Cape.
But fire is on the increase, here and around the world: “Increasing trends in provincial fire frequency were observed in eight of the nine provinces of South Africa,” wrote Sheldon Strydom and Michael J Savage in A spatio-temporal analysis of fires in South Africa, published in the November/December 2016 issue of the South African Journal of Science.
And with good reason.
The climate change connection
Because climate change is an incubator of fire: higher temperatures, drier soil and drier vegetation create perfect conditions for fire; the energetic winds of a warmer planet compound the problem, as Garden Route residents found.
You are unlikely to get a scientist to say definitively that such-and-such a fire was ‘caused’ by climate change, because it’s hard to unpick local factors from global trends, but it’s very clear that climate change plays a role.
Two scientists published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October last year which tried to give a quantum to climate as a trigger of the runaway fires in the Western USA of recent decades.
“They found that spring and summer temperatures warmed by 2 to 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius) since 1950, which is in agreement with the warming that climate models attribute to human-caused climate change. This warming led to significant drying within western U.S. forests, accounting for approximately 55 percent of the documented increases in forest aridity from 1979 to 2015.”
The result? “Wildfires in the western United States have been increasing in frequency and duration since the mid-1980s, occurring nearly four times more often, burning more than six times the land area, and lasting almost five times as long…”
More frequent fire days (days when the conditions are conducive to fire – high temperatures, dry conditions and strong winds) are expected to increase by 20% to 50% in coming years.
Bushfire frequency increased by 40% in the last decade in Australia. But in Oz, “fire services and bureaucrats have been working together for several decades to improve how we tackle the increasing bushfire risk. The measures include banning the lighting of fires or the use of dangerous equipment on days with severe fire risk, increasing the equipment and personnel available to fight fires before they spread, and setting up targeted information campaigns to ensure that people understand the risks and what can be done to reduce them.”
What is our state of preparedness? Have we got contingency plans in place to beat catastrophic fires like the one in the Garden Route? Working on Fire and Working for Water have done great stuff managing fire-friendly aliens (like eucalyptus and pine that’s invaded Garden Route landscape, but do we need to do more in high-risk areas?)
Bear in mind that alien plants change the nature of natural fires: “higher fire intensity on invaded areas leads to the development of water-repellent layers in the soil” – something we can ill afford in a country where water (and soil erosion) is a huge and growing concern.
Are we doing enough to make all South Africans fire-aware and wary?
I believe we need to up our game to face this risk, which has such awful fall-out.
* Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE UPDATE: Get Fin24's top morning business news and opinions in your inbox
