World Burns Year-Round
The overlap of seasons exhausts the resources used to fight fires.
SYDNEY, Australia — Sharing the giant air tankers that fight fires 19,000 liters of water at a time used to be simpler. California’s wildfires faded before Australia’s bush fires surged, leaving time to prepare, move and deploy planes from one continent to another. But climate change is subverting the system. Fire seasons are running longer, stronger, hotter. The major fires now blanketing Sydney in smoke started early, within days of the last California blazes.
And the strain is global. Countries that used to manage without extra help, like Chile, Bolivia and Cyprus, have started competing for plane and helicopter contracts as their own fires intensify. That is stretching capacity for the companies that provide most of the globe’s largest firefighting aircraft, and increasing anxiety for fire officials worldwide.
“We’re all feeling it,” said Richard Alder, general manager of Australia’s National Aerial Firefighting Center. “As fire seasons ramp up and get longer — and they definitely seem to be doing that, the science tells us that — it places more demand on aircraft to support the firefighting. And it’s only one part of the equation.”
The age of fire is upon us, scientists say, and the system built to contain it is being pushed to its limits. While firefighting is still primarily done on the ground, frightened residents are increasingly demanding costly assistance from the air. The European Union created a reserve fund this year for firefighting aircraft, with contracts allowing for deployments across national borders. Bolivia leased
the world’s only Boeing 747 water bomber to fight fires in the Amazon in August, after the plane had been used in Israel in 2016, Chile in 2017 and California in 2018. South Korea is reaching out to companies like 10 Tanker Air Carrier in New Mexico, while Indonesia borrowed an air tanker from Australia a few years ago that came from Coulson Aviation in Canada, which is now doubling the size of its contract fleet.
These companies are planning for a world ablaze year-round. “It’s coming from all over,” said John E. Gould, head of 10 Tanker. “Fires are affecting climates and places they never used to affect.”
That has forced firefighting “to be a global effort, not a state or national effort,” said Stuart Ellis, the chief executive of the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council, which manages fire planning for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. “It’s not just a firefighting issue. We need to be more critical of our planning decisions. We need to examine building in bush-fire-prone areas. People love living in the bush, but as the bush is becoming more vulnerable, is that viable?”
In Australia, the conservative government rejects a discussion of climate change and its impact. But the country is fast becoming a fiery test case for the building pressures. Australia is arid and expansive, with large cities sprawling toward wilderness. Climate change is already delivering a sharp shift in precipitation, spurring a lengthy drought. Dry areas are now drier and larger, with forests becoming tinderboxes waiting for a spark.
In the last few weeks, more than 1,000 firefighters have been battling over 120 blazes in four states. In some areas, no significant rainfall is expected until January, though rain has helped firefighters in parts of New South Wales.
Fire officials say they are being forced to imagine, for the first time, overlapping and intensifying demands.
Neither aircraft nor ground crews can do much for the blazes that spread quickly with powerful winds. The Tubbs Fire that destroyed parts of Santa Rosa, California, in 2017 jumped an eight-lane freeway. The winds supercharging the Camp Fire that burned the town of Paradise, California, last year pushed water bombers too high to drop payloads.
Aircraft use, and fire management costs, are soaring. Chile, which expanded its contracts with Coulson this year, spent more than three times as much on firefighting from 2014 to 2018 as during the previous five years.
The United States Forest Service spent more than $1 billion on fire suppression in 13 of the 18 years between 2000 and 2017. Costs surpassed $2 billion for the first time in 2017 and 2018, when California’s fire seasons were especially severe.
In Australia, because the responsibility largely resides with individual states, fire officials are worried whether the system can handle what’s on the way. Of Australia’s 300,000 fire and emergency service personnel, roughly 85 percent are volunteers who tend to stay where they live. Aircraft that dump firefighting materials are thus increasingly seen as the most vital weapons for what officials call “surge capacity,” the ability to add resources as fires defy control.
Two years ago, the National Aerial Firefighting Center, which coordinates air support for all of Australia’s states and territories, sent a proposal to Parliament asking for a more than 70 percent increase in its annual federal funding, to 26 million Australian dollars ($17.7 million). The request was ignored.
There will be seven large air tankers in Australia this fire season; a DC-10 owned by 10 Tanker arrived in New South Wales after fighting the recent fires in California. The state also recently bought a 737 Fireliner that carries 15,000 liters of liquid.
But buying or leasing a water tanker is not as easy as ordering hoses. The planes being modified are typically decades old. It can take years to turn them into firefighting weapons, and officials are anxious about whether the market will meet their needs.
All 18 of the large air tankers that the United States Forest Service plans to use through 2022 will come from private contractors, according to the agency’s strategy.
The more that fires surge into fall for California, the worse it may be for Australia and the rest of the world when it’s time to share.
“I suspect we’re all becoming more nervous,” said Mr. Alder, who has been fighting fires in Australia for decades. “We’re keeping a watchful eye on it.”