Opportunities for improved firefighter safety in Australia

John O’Donnell Opinion Piece

Firefighter safety in Australia requires urgent attention as forest structure, fuel loads and fire behaviour shift toward more dangerous conditions. Past crown fires have created dense shrub dominated understoreys, abundant dead wood, reduced height stratification and continuous vertical and horizontal fuel pathways. These changes favour highly combustible species, replace grassy forest types and generate higher fuel loads, easier crown access and more uniform landscape connectivity. The result is greater intensity, severity and duration in subsequent fires and a recurring cycle of extreme bushfire behaviour that significantly increases firefighter risk.

O’Donnell (2023) identifies 21 major firefighter safety concerns across southeastern Australian forests. These include insufficient prescribed burning, inadequate resilient forest management, unsafe access and evacuation routes, poorly located water supplies, ineffective suppression techniques, declining backburning expertise, misuse of aircraft, under adoption of safety technologies, loss of local knowledge, hazardous smoke exposure, declining skilled workforce and other concerns.

O’Donnell (2025a) further argues that failures in mitigation, policy and accountability force crews into long unburnt, high fuel forests where flame heights, spotting distances, tree fall hazards and poor access routinely exceed safe suppression thresholds. He notes that dense understorey fuels and dead timber represent major hazards across southeastern Australia and that future bushfires under bad weather and drought conditions will likely be of high intensity, high severity and long duration, making firefighting extremely difficult.

Prescribed burning is central to reducing these risks. Burrows and Sneeuwjagt (2020a) emphasise that fuel reduction burning makes fires slower, less intense and far easier and safer to suppress. Long unburnt eucalypt forests accumulate deep layers of dead fine fuels exceeding 50 t/ha, dramatically increasing flame height, spotting potential and suppression difficulty.

Historical data from southwest Western Australia show wildfire extent escalates when annual fuel reduction falls below about 8 percent of the landscape. Burrows and Sneeuwjagt (2020b) highlight that prescribed burning expands the suppression window, reduces flame height and spotting, improves access and egress, creates anchor points and enables safer backburning and rapid containment line construction.

Recent research reinforces the dangers of high severity and repeat fires. Barker and Price (2018) show that high severity fire produces structural legacies that increase the probability of extreme severity in the next fire, creating a positive feedback loop. Barker et al. (2021) demonstrate that high severity fires produce denser midstorey fuels and reduced canopy cover, increasing vertical fuel continuity and crown involvement. Kasel et al. (2024) highlight that short interval, high severity wildfires deplete diversity, alter species composition and increase flammability, exposing resilience debt and driving long term ecological instability. van Wagtendonk et al. (2012) show that reburn severity reflects combined legacies of fire history, vegetation structure and weather.

The review also incorporates international safety insights. Kantor et al. (2026) provide quantitative data linking specific fire management activities to injury frequency and severity, showing that many injuries arise from environmental hazards rather than unsafe behaviour.

The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center provides extensive incident data on medical events, tree strikes, entrapments, vehicle incidents, heat illness and aviation incidents. Gabbert (2016) shows that medical issues, aircraft accidents and vehicle accidents each contribute more fatalities than entrapments, but the later is a major issue.

Section 10 outlines 54 opportunities to improve firefighter safety, including explicit fuel reduction targets, ridge top burning, dead timber treatment, improved access and egress, statutory safety objectives, independent oversight, enhanced training, updated suppression doctrine, entrapment avoidance procedures, tree hazard assessments, contingency planning and national aviation operating procedures.