For City Of Hobart, A Repeat Of Horrific Black Tuesday Fires Not A Matter Of If, But When

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Photo: Collins Street in Hobart's CBD under a bright orange haze in 1967, contrasted with today. (Supplied: Jane Maarseveen/ABC News: Erin Cooper)

Anna Reynolds looks out from her loungeroom in the foothills of kunanyi/Mount Wellington across suburban bushland filled with homes."Every firefighter and fire expert I speak to says it's not a question of if we get a big fire, it's when," Cr Reynolds, Hobart's Lord Mayor, says. "And a lot of them are increasingly nervous that when is going to be very soon."

Her council will spend $1.9 million on bushfire preparations this year. The money will go to fire-trail management, hazard reduction bur"It's absolutely the number-one risk to Hobart. We've always been a dry city. But with climate change it's becoming a tinderbox city," she says. She fears there is a gap between the concern felt at council and within the Tasmanian Fire Service (TFS), compared with what she sees happening in backyards.ns and firebreaks.


Photo: More than 60 people died in Tasmania's 1967 bushfires. (ABC Archives)

On February 7, 1967, David Brill was a young cameraman at the ABC, racing from inferno to inferno and capturing images that went around the world. Sixty-two people died in those fires. More than 1,000 homes were destroyed. "It's beautiful to live in the bush. But one day 1967 will happen again. It will happen. Particularly with climate change," Brill says.

One of the images that has stayed with him for 50 years is the memory of racing to the Cascade Brewery in South Hobart. The brewery was razed, the homes and bush smouldering. In the middle of the road was a trolley-bus. "There was a trolley-bus here, burned out. All the tyres melted. The windows were blown out by memory. Where did the people go?" he asks. As he stands beside the Cascade Brewery looking up into the hills and the houses that dot them he worries that the lessons of the past have been forgotten.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-23/experts-warn-fire-threat-to-hobart-is-imminent/11531494