A 19-years old firewoman

Blog post by Caterina Cainca

Images showing dead kangaroos and entire forests burning have reached every single part of the world. I am talking about Australia and the huge consequences this island has been dealing with during the last years and that led to the so-called Black Summer.

The story I am about to tell you does not concern gas emissions percentage or data regarding the extinction of kangaroos, even if it wouldn’t be that bad showing some empirical material.

However, this is the story of a girl and her strength.

Her name is India and she lives in a small town called Goongerah, in the state of Victoria.

It was December 2019, India was just 19 years old when the bushfires came to her town: the Black Summer begun.

Her mother and sisters moved to the city but she made the decision to stay in order to save the house her father built himself and in which she grew up.

She had never used a fire extinguisher before but she knew she was capable. She had to control her fear but what made her be quite was the fire bunker they had. There they had food and water and a safe place to stay.

Her father was prepared, he saved their house during a bushfire in 2014 by himself. He is part of the CFA, the country fire authority; let’s say, he knew what he was doing. During the previous weeks they had been checking the wind pattern and the fire movements. Her father showed her how to work.

It was Monday, 30 December 2019. The firebushes were expanding, she had to fight alone on one side of the house, while her father was on the other. There was strong wind and thick smoke. A tree fell on the house and the flames were going towards the house. In that moment she thought she was going to lose everything. The chuck house was burnt. She was scary, but not too much because she knew she had the right equipment.

The firebushes diminished.

Although they stayed they did loose a lot.

That night they slept in the cellar and kept waking up doing checks.

In her community that night 10 houses were lost.

When people ask her: “are you traumatized?”, she says “no”; she feels good, resilient, she had love and support around her, she knows what she did was amazing but she doesn’t want to do it all over again.

India and her family are safe now, but they experienced a nightmare, and even if the bushfires stopped they are still dealing with the consequences.

In order to understand which consequences I am talking about, look at these photos. They have been taken in Wollongong, a city located in the region of New South Wales, one of the Australian region most affected by climate change.

Now look what the sky looks like when there are no bushfires ongoing.

The black summer

Due to bushfires during 2019-2020 in Australia 24 million hectars of land were burnt, 3000 houses destroyed and three billion animals killed or displaced. Thirty-three people died. It mostly affected the southeast Australia.

This unprecedented phenomena, in terms of scale and harm, was influenced by a strong positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), a natural climate driver associated with decreased rainfall across large part of Australia.

An extended series of positive IOD events occurred over the three years before 2020, with 2019 being one of the strongest in record.

Human-caused climate change, combined with multiple climate drivers resulted in many Black Summer extremes.
However, the Black Summer was expected. There were all the conditions to set the scenes for this summer’s fires: hot, drought and reduced rainfall. 2018-2019 was Australia’s hottest and driest two-year period on record.

Perspectives are even worse, experts say: “We saw during our Black Summer how severe bushfires in Australia can be, how damaging and sustained. It’s a trend we can expect to continue to worsen unless we rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.

Long-term effects

Previous bushfires impacted long-term mental health, increased rates of domestic violence and abuse of alchol in the affected communities.

Given the size of this fenomena the mental health impacts caused by the Black Summer will be long-lived and widespread.

This country is dealing with the consequences of the climate change before than others, but it doesn’t mean that we are not going to experience the nightmare India experienced.

We have to keep ourselves informed and starting taking this enourmous issue more seriously otherwise there is going to be no way out.