Black Saturday was not a once-in-one-70-year event. While the main fire followed much the same trajectory as Black Friday 1939, it was not a repeat of that fire. Nor was it the result of 'green' policies that restricted hazard reduction burning, or of the incompetence of government or emergency authorities.
Black Saturday was a new phenomenon, a glimpse into the future. It was the first fire of the era of global warming and it was terrifying. No one had ever seen anything like its velocity and intensity. It resulted in a new category of fire assessment: 'catastrophic'.
So what were the new elements? As submissions to the Royal Commission by scientists like Professors Neville Nichols of Monash and Peter A. Gell of Ballarat University pointed out, the answer is that south-eastern Australia is drying out and the most plausible cause is global warming. Victoria has had a 20 per cent drop in rainfall over the last 12 years. Recent summers have been the hottest and driest on record, way outside the normal range.
As Nichols told the Commission: 'The gradual warming of Australian mean maximum temperature of about 0.75°C most likely ... contributed to the extreme heat observed on [Black Saturday] ... It seems unlikely that such new records, so far outside prior experience, would have occurred in the absence of gradual warming since about 1970.'
Nichols also emphasised 'the chronic Victorian rainfall decline over the past decade'. The weather systems that brought rain to the south-east are shifting further south so that much of the rain now falls either over the ocean or western Tasmania. It is misleading to talk about a 'drought', because that implies that things will eventually return to 'normal'. In fact, the present weather conditions are the new 'normal'.
This will lead to bushfires that are more frequent and intense, of greater velocity and more widespread. No longer are Black Friday and Ash Wednesday the norms by which fires are judged; the new measure is Black Saturday. Psychologically this has left many people gobsmacked. They are unable to comprehend what has happened, let alone think that Black Saturday might now be the norm for future bushfires.
Unfortunately the Royal Commission doesn't seem to recognise this. The whole feel of its recommendations is business as usual. There is a lack of historical context and a failure to recognise that we have entered a new fire context.