Millions of Australians and billions of dollars worth of their homes are at risk of an LA-style firestorm, a new report has revealed.
Millions of Aussie families and homes are at risk from unstoppable Los Angeles-style suburban firestorm.
A day out from the one year anniversary of the LA blaze, fire fighters and climate experts are warning Australia’s flame threat is spreading and areas and times of the year once considered safe are now at risk.
And with housing expanding on urban fringes, up to 6.9 million people around the nation could be in the path of bushfires firefighters won’t be able to stop.
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The Climate Council and Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, a group of former fire chiefs, has issued the stark warning in a report that shows outer suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart could all face risks of LA-style blazes.
Alarmingly, its analysis shows that the fires that burned LA had the same characteristics as those that sparked Black Saturday in Victoria early in 2009.
The group is calling for more government investment in resilience programs and infrastructure, increased efforts to address climate change as well as for average Australians to take a more active role in the bushfire risks they face.
Climate Change Authority data suggests every dollar spent on climate adaptation and risk reduction saves the nation $2-$11 in recovery costs.
The report’s authors have also warned the nation’s housing affordability crisis is driving families to live on suburban fringes are putting more and more families in harm’s way.
Catastrophic fires burn through Los Angeles in the middle of winter, 2025. Picture: Brandon Bell / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA.
Black Saturday bushfires burn near Pakenham in Victoria.
The report notes that Melbourne and Perth’s outer suburb populations have more than doubled since 2005, risen 36 per cent in Adelaide, a third in Hobart and 24 per cent in Sydney.
The report warns more than 1.6 million Sydneysiders on the city’s fringe in areas like Penrith, Hornsby, the Northern Beaches, The Hills, Sutherland and Illawarra are at risk if fires reach the city’s limits, with the possibility thousands of homes could be lost.
In Melbourne, suburbs along the Dandenong Ranges and Warrandyte are at the greatest risk, but with more than two million people living in the city’s outer fringes tens of thousands of homes could burn if conditions turn ugly.
The nation’s capital, Canberra, has been named as the country’s most similar city to Los Angeles for its fire risk with large numbers of homes near and even backing onto forest and grassland – with 332,760 people assessed as in risky locations.
Declining rainfall in Adelaide has more than 407,000 residents across areas like the Adelaide Hills at risk.
Sydney bushfire risk (Source 360info).
Melbourne bushfire risk (Source 360info).
Hobart was ranked one of the nation’s most fire exposed cities, with more fuel to burn than Melbourne and being surrounded by forests, with South and West Hobart, Fern Tree, Sandy Bay and Mt Nelson at risk.
While Brisbane and most of South East Queensland hasn’t had bushfire events seen in other parts of the nation, there are 1.4m people living in outer suburban areas that could be exposed if fires did come near the capital or the state’s major cities.
Climate Council chief executive Amanda McKenzie said with billions of dollars worth of homes on capital city fringes potentially at risk, one of the big concerns was that past severe fires had required a combination of hot weather, dry conditions and wind.
Pointing to Dolphin Sands fires that destroyed 19 homes near Hobart in December, she said with the temperature a relatively cool 28C, the area had burnt mostly as a result of windier conditions that also made it difficult for firefighting aircraft to respond.
Climate Council chief executive Amanda McKenzie has warned millions of Australians could be impacted by LA-style bushfires.
Aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires, the remains of a house at Humevale. Picture: Andrew Henshaw.
“That level of homes lost from wind being the principal driver shows that the lessons of Los Angeles are significant for Australia’s regional centres and cities,” Ms McKenzie said.
“LA was dry and had high winds, but it wasn’t hot. And that was enough to lose 16,000 homes.”
She said suburban Australian homes potentially in the path of fires would be worth billions of dollars and Australians needed to be “much more conscious of where we are building”.
Ms McKenzie added that by-products of burning coal, gas and oil created a blanket of gases that trapped heat around the earth, leading to the increased overall temperatures and wilder weather.
Former NSW fire chief and founder of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action Greg Mullins said changing weather at the global scale had “fundamentally changed the dynamics of firefighting”.
Brisbane bushfire risk (Source 360info).
Adelaide bushfire risk (Source 360info).
Mr Mullins said climate change caused temperature rises worldwide, meaning more moisture in the atmosphere as it was drawn out of vegetation by heat and plants drying out far more rapidly than they used to.
He said this was creating greater risk of storms that can spark fires with lighting strikes, more difficult wind conditions to fight fires in, and leading to drier vegetation that burns hotter today than it did 20 years ago.
While fire fighting services were getting better capacity, more aircraft and better technology, the fire fighting veteran said Australia would inevitably face LA-style fires it couldn’t stop.
“We just have to stand back and try to save lives, and that’s our first priority, and we will try to save property when the weather permits,” Mr Mullins said.
After fighting fires from Australia to the US since the 1970s, he said Australia had already dodged a Los Angeles-style firestorm in suburbia at least once during the nation’s Black Summer in 2019 and 2020.
Greg Mullins is a veteran firefighter who believes the nature of bushfires has changed, and unstoppable firestorms like those seen in LA could easily happen here.
“One of the fires could have crossed the Hawksbury River into Hornsby local government area, and Castle Hill and the Northern Beaches, and it was just a lucky change of wind direction that stopped it,” he said.
“We really dodged a bullet there. It could have come through on a 10km front and there’s not a lot we could have done to stop it.
“If we have another Black Summer that hits residential areas, we could lose thousands and thousands of homes.”
Mr Mullins said the worsening fire conditions were also posing a risk to firefighter and volunteer numbers.
While fighting the fires in Batemans Bay in the NSW southern coast in 2019, not far from where the navy had to evacuate Malacoota in Victoria by sea, he said “I didn’t think I was coming home”.
“There were hundreds of homes burning and we were just powerless,” he said.
“And this is a mental blow on firefighters, who are going there to save people and they just have to sit there and watch things burn and try to save their own life.”
Stats reveal how many homes are in urban fringe locations at risk of LA-style fires.
The danger is also being compounded by fires creating their own weather, particularly pyroconvective storms, with research showing the phenomena has gone from 60 events in the 40 years ending in 2018, to 45 detected in the span of six months from 2019-20.
Volunteer firefighter Amanda Lamont lives in a home zoned with one of the most dangerous fire ratings in the nation in Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges.
Last March, when a reserve in nearby Montrose caught fire, putting suburban streets at risk as her own home was effectively safe, she said it had become clear that even residents of suburbia now needed a fire plan in place
“Everyone needs to know this could happen to them, you are not safe because you are in a different street,” she said.
Her situation has also exposed a growing risk for all Australians facing soaring insurance premiums, whether fires come near their homes or not.
Despite cutting back her contents coverage to get her insurance bill below $200 a month a little while ago, she’s just had it rise back to $420 a month.
Volunteer firefighter Amanda Lamont lives in a high-risk fire zone, but believes one of the big risks for homeowners are their insurance costs.
“I’ve been here for 13 years and have had a really great time, and I’m starting to think is it time for me to move on,” Ms Lamont said.
“And, if it does burn down, I’m in a flame zone – will council reissue a permit to built here again?”
With the nation still not investing enough into adaptation and mitigation, and preparing communities and services and non-polluting energy sources, it was increasingly important for individual families to take the actions they could.
To this end, she said actively looking to reduce the use of fossil fuels and town planners putting more consideration into where homes are allowed to be built was increasingly important.
“It’s not just that a red fire truck will come and save you, we have got to stop people thinking that,” she said.
“Everyone now needs to look at how they can support themselves and their neighbours and their communities.”
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