Canberra has the best infrastructure of any city in Australia. It is the best planned city in Australia. Yet the bushfire at the weekend claimed more houses than any other bushfire in Australia’s history. The official count yesterday was 388 houses, but it is likely to pass 400.
The key to it is the word itself – BUSHfire. (SUBS: italic bush please)
In Australia, bushfires often claim the odd rural dwelling or half a dozen houses or so when a bushfire comes to the edge of a town or city.
But Canberra is a different city. It is known as the Bush Capital. So if your city is bush, then it, too, will subject to bushfire – in a way that other towns and cities will not. In other places, the fire hits the edge of town and stops.
In Canberra at the weekend, the very fact that the city is so beautifully planned was its nemesis.
It starts with Walter Burley Griffin – the architect and town planner man who won the design competition for Canberra in the early years of last century.
He was influenced by the beautiful-cities movement – a reaction to the blight of cities that grew out of control after the Industrial Revolution. Griffin wanted an uplifting city. His plan required that none of the hills in the city area be built upon. His legacy was Canberra’s National Capital Open Space System. The idea was that instead of unlimited built-up area, people anywhere in the national capital – even from Parliament House itself – could look out and see green and natural beauty.
But on Saturday morning, they looked out at an ominous grey and white sky in the west, not knowing what was to come.
A roaring north-west wind drove a bushfire in the west to the edge of the city.
Here the fire did not meet a fire-unfriendly slab of urban development – of tar, cement and bricks. Rather it met the Bush Capital.
In the 1960s and beyond, Griffin’s successor, the National Capital Development Commission, built upon the work of Griffin and of Canberra’s first chief forest officer Charles Weston to put trees on to the treeless Limestone Plains upon which Canberra was to be built.
The NCDC issued every new householder 10 trees and 40 shrubs for free. The NCDC also developed a generous system of parklands. More damningly for the weekend, the NCDC created a system of well treed cycleways and footpaths that ran between the houses.
The bushfire came into this environment early on Saturday afternoon. By 4pm it was so dark that in inner south Canberra – including the precinct of Parliament House itself — the street lights came on. Further out, the wall of fire hit the western suburbs – particularly Duffy. To make things worse, Canberra has had a month of water restrictions and public-spirited Canberrans slashed watering their gardens and allowed their lawns to die.
The fire raced through the NCDC’s well-treed walkways and along the National Capital Open Space System. Houses caught fire several kilometres in from the city’s perimeter. Some houses were lost in Curtin, less than four kilometres from Parliament House and just a couple of kilometres from Government House.
A fire that close to the White House and the Capitol would have seen the President call out the National Guard.
No such luck in Canberra.
A similarly sized Newcastle, Wollongong or Geelong could call on large resources from their respective state capitals in the same jurisdiction. The ACT got voluntary help from elsewhere but its authorities could not order resources in.
Some attacked the lack of resources, but ACT Chief Minister Jon (SUBS: correct Jon) Stanhope put it in perspective.
Canberra has enough fully staffed fire tenders to deal with six simultaneous house fires – which should be enough for a city this size. At the worse stage on Saturday, 200 houses were on fire. It would have required 400 fully staffed fire tenders to cope. No city could support such resources for a once-in-a-century event. No-one could have anticipated it, or even if they did could have done much about it. It was a natural disaster beyond human resources.
The death toll of just two was fortunately low. The health system coped fairly easily with the 300 injured.
But the design of the city meant significant public assets were lost. Canberra’s public health laboratories went up, as did a school and several buildings used by community groups and charities. Twenty per cent of the city was still without power last night (SUBS: Sunday night – the position will not change) and a large amount of electricity infrastructure was lost.
But in getting help to people and restoring infrastructure Canberra’s administrative had one advantage: it does not have three tiers of government like other places in Australia. It has no local-level government. So the state (territory) government could deal with the lot.
Chief Minister Jon (SUBS: CORRECT Jon) Stanhope declared a state of emergency under the Emergency Management Act and transferred wide powers to the “Territory Controller” — ACT Chief Police Officer John Murray. He in turn handed them to Emergency Services chief Peter Lucas-Smith who was in charge of fire fighting. It was a fairly streamlined administrative operation. The powers (which are revocable) were needed as some people needed to be saved from themselves. In most cases it is best to stay with your house, but sometimes people have to be told or forced to evacuate or be prevented from going home.
The latter caused some friction because it defied conventional advice and people thought they were being denied a chance to save their homes. But the Canberra fire was different. It was not a question of putting out spot fires to save houses. Very close to some houses trees exploded and a 20-metre wall of flame bore down, because of the nature of the Bush Capital.
The historic Mount Stromlo was damaged. Its fate was uncertain yesterday. There is some irony in that. A decade ago, the astronomers opposed urban in-fill plans around Duffy because of urban light interfering in telescope observations. That in-fill might have helped cut fire damage.
Deputy Chief Minister Ted Quinlan suggested a review of policies about bush proximity to houses.
However, despite the losses at the weekend, I suspect most Canberrans would be very reluctant to give up their Bush Capital, to surrender green space to building, or allow building on the hills.
But given the huge support to those who lost their houses, there is another Canberra epithet that will probably left behind after weekend – that is Canberra as the City Without a Soul.