As unseasonably early bushfires tore through Gippsland in Victoria on Tuesday, residents of the same region were told to prepare for major flooding.
“It’s the first time the Victorian emergency map showed flood warnings and fire warnings for the same area on the same day,” says the Wellington shire mayor, Ian Bye.
The fires started on Sunday when a home was lost to a 17,500-hectare bushfire in Briagolong. By midweek, 130 properties in and around Tinamba, Newry and Maffra were issued evacuation orders due to flooding.
“We’ve had floods upon floods in Sale, but to have a fire event that early in the season is extraordinary – and to have them back-to-back is just weird. It’s unheard of,” says Bye.
As the local state MP, Danny O’Brien, puts it, the area had “fires literally one day, floods the next”.
“We’re a bloody resilient bunch in Gippsland, but sometimes it feels like a bit too much to take.”
As overwhelming as it is, the sequence of climatic events in the dairy and agricultural region slots neatly into a bigger picture of unsettling superlatives.
Australia recorded its driest, and third-warmest, September on record. In Europe, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Poland and Switzerland all experienced their warmest September on record. Global average temperatures in September were the hottest ever recorded.
In Australia we can expect to see more “compound events”, such as floods and fires together or a storm with a king tide, says Prof Lisa Alexander of the University of New South Wales’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.
“It’s very hard to project what will happen but this is something that we’re actually really worried about in the future. On their own, floods or fires are worrying, but together, as we are seeing in Gippsland, they are even more extreme.”
Facing strong winds and fierce and unseasonal temperatures, Gippslanders had little choice but to be resilient. From Sunday to Tuesday, the community banded together, sharing bushfire warning notices, helping evacuations and providing shelter.
Eugene Downing, the general manager of Maffra community sports club, says the club provided 190 meals to firefighters on Monday and Tuesday. Loch Sport’s pub gave out free meals. The manager of Sale racecourse offered 100 stalls to large animals that needed shelter, Bye says.
Then came the rain, and flood evacuees began arriving at the emergency fire shelter that had been set up at the Gippsland regional sports complex in Sale. On Thursday, 20 people were still taking shelter at the complex.
“It does feel crazy, but Gippslanders are used to bushfire plans. To have that backed up with a flood 24 hours later, it’s bizarre,” Downing says.
“It’s probably mother nature telling us that we need to be prepared for anything.”
Tegan Hector, who runs Eulinga Park Equine in Fulham, was evacuating horses on Tuesday afternoon from bushfire-threatened Fernbank. Less than 24 hours later, she evacuated horses from Maffra because of floods.
“One of the girls that works with me was under evacuation orders for fires on Monday and then floods on Wednesday. It was just crazy,” she says.
There were a lot of people caught off guard by the floods, she says, with one hayshed owner dousing the land to prepare for fire only to be inundated by flood waters 40 hours later.
Alexander says compound events will test how different emergency services and agencies work together.
“We’re going to have to rely a lot on the Bureau of Meteorology to make very good forecasts and it’s going to stretch emergency services,” she says.
Mark Cattell, the agency commander of Victoria’s State Emergency Service, says volunteers had “been able to quickly transition to adapt to the dynamic situation”. Community fire service volunteers, who worked for three days to contain the bushfires, were assisting the SES in flood support efforts.
The Country Fire Authority chief officer, Jason Heffernan, says “Victoria is one of the most bushfire-prone areas in the world and our crews have been protecting lives and property in this environment for decades”.
“Our volunteers are highly trained, professional firefighters that have made every effort to prepare their communities ahead of this fire season, as they do every year.”
At Lake Glenmaggie, attention is now turning to dam management. Inflows into Lake Glenmaggie had begun to ease by Thursday afternoon, with the release of water lowered from 58,000 to 40,000 megalitres a day. Questions are being asked about the timing of water releases, Hector says.
“If they had spilled earlier, could the people downstream have avoided flooding?”
With Maffra safe, Downing on Thursday afternoon helped his friends who manage the 150-year-old Tinamba hotel, which was sandbagged at 10pm on Wednesday.
“I can’t predict the future,” Downing says. “But if the history of the last week is a precursor of what is to come this summer: if you’re in a flood zone, make sure you have a plan. If you’re in a fire-prone area, make sure you stand ready.”
