New South Wales can expect a late onset to this summer’s potentially deadly bushfire season after a wet winter, according to the Rural Fire Service’s annual outlook.
Heavy rains over the past financial year led to higher regrowth and an increased risk of fast-moving grass fires, the outlook released on Wednesday states.
At the same time, the NSW emergency services minister, Jihad Dib, has warned that 2024-25’s severe flooding and cyclone events hampered efforts to meet hazard reduction targets, which were expected to be limited further by a wetter than average spring.
“With the rain, we see a lot of growth that’s … developed and, as a result of that, as soon as we get some dry hot weather, that grass will start to dry out and become quite easy for burning,” the minister said.
The RFS commissioner, Trent Curtin, who took over from outgoing commissioner Rob Rogers in July, said areas burnt in the 2019-20 black summer bushfires were at risk again after six years of regrowth.
“We’re expecting fast-running grass fires to occur, that will impact communities, that will potentially threaten lives,” he said.
Heavy rain, including one of the state’s wettest winters on record, had severely affected hazard reduction burning efforts.
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Fire agencies completed about 100,000 hectares of hazard reduction in the 2024-25 financial year, Dib told budget estimates this month, less than 27% of the targeted 377,290 hectares. That figure included hazard reductions that could not be completed in previous years.
However, Dib said the focused work that was completed could protect about 166,000 properties – or 80% of the properties the RFS hoped to make safe.
“It’s … no secret that we haven’t been able to meet all of our targets when it comes to hazard reduction,” Dib told parliament on Wednesday. Fire agencies were targeting 372,700 hectares in 2025-26 to potentially protect 232,600 properties.
Hazard reduction – which requires “Goldilocks” levels of heat and dryness – traditionally occurs in autumn, although the RFS now thinks in terms of windows, not seasons.
Phil Banks, a volunteer RFS group captain on the far south coast, told Guardian Australia he hoped a recruitment drive this weekend would bolster the numbers of volunteers which dropped below 70,000 in 2024-25. He said the economic climate meant many people were unable to give up a day of work when the right conditions for hazard reduction burns presented.
Nevertheless, Banks – a captain of an RFS brigade in the Bega Valley during black summer – said he was cautiously optimistic about the coming bushfire season. Unlike 2019-20, it has not been preceded by drought, he said.
“We’ve got moisture and we’ve got water in creeks and dams,” he said. This did mean, however, that some places could be hard to access during fires because “you wouldn’t be able to put a truck on it because the ground is wet”.
The RFS urged households to spend this weekend preparing for the coming season, with an emphasis on protecting properties against embers blowing up to 30km ahead of any fire front, the leading cause of property loss during bushfires.
While 70% of residents in fire-prone areas had a plan for an emergency, fewer than half took precautions like clearing gutters and maintaining hoses, the service said.
Nigel Sargent, brigade captain of the Nelligen RFS, said there was growing anxiety in communities as, with each passing bushfire season, they moved further from “a period where the burn scar has provided a level of protection”.
“It’s really hard to tell how bad it will be and how the community is going to respond,” he told Guardian Australia.
The RFS’s advice comes as a landmark national climate risk assessment report warned that no Australian community would escape the climate crisis if global heating continued unabated.
David Bowman, professor of pyrogeography at the University of Tasmania, said NSW was already experiencing climate “whiplash” between flood and drought. There was the risk of fast-burning grass fires and intense forest fires if the rain “abruptly stops”.
“[Grass fires] are some of the most frightening fires because of the speed at which they’re able to move – they can overrun firefighting capacity.
“The landscapes that have been burnt [in 2019-20]– if you go into them, they’re incredibly thick. Once they dry out, there are really going to be some big fires.”
Bowman said forests around the Blue Mountains, in particular, had recovered quickly.
Martin Tebbutt, who lives in Bilpin, said the growth in the town was “pretty much the same as it was in 2019”.
Tebbutt, who has written to the minister about what he says is a lack of hazard reduction in Bilpin, called for greater investment in mechanical methods, such as slashing undergrowth and clearing vegetation.
“It’s wonderful to have all these extra planes and helicopters,” Tebbutt said of the state budget’s allocation of $34.4m over four years for new firefighting aircraft and helicopters. “But fires don’t burn without fuel.”
