The Daily - Why Australia Is Burning

Episode Date: January 13, 2020

Wildfires are devastating Australia, incinerating an area roughly the size of West Virginia and killing 24 people and as many as half a billion animals. Today, we look at the human and environmental costs of the disaster, its connection to climate change and why so many Australians are frustrated by Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s response. Guest: Livia Albeck-Ripka, a reporter for The Times in Melbourne a reporter for The Times in Melbourne who spoke with Susan Pulis, a woman who fled the fires with kangaroos and koalas in her car. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: After Australia’s hottest and driest year on record, Mr. Morrison has minimized the connection between the wildfire crisis and climate change and declined to make moves to curb the country’s carbon emissions.Many Australians entered the new year under apocalyptic blood-red skies as smoke from the fires choked the country’s southeastern coast. “I look outside and it’s like the end of the world. Armageddon is here,” one woman in Canberra said.The fires have burned through dozens of towns, destroying at least 3,000 homes. Now, unbridled by continuous fire fighting, the blazes have returned to some scorched areas to level what is left. Rupert Murdoch controls the largest news company in Australia, and his newspapers have contributed to a wave of misinformation about the cause of the fires.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the Prime Minister of Australia is calling for a high-level investigation into how the country's government has responded to the devastating wildfires there. My colleague, Livia Albeck-Ripka, on the events that led up to this moment. It's Monday, January 13th. Livia, you're on the ground in Australia covering these wildfires that have been raging throughout the continent. What have you been seeing these past few weeks? So the scenes that are unfolding here in Australia are totally unprecedented. You know, we do have bushfires here in Australia,

but what we're seeing now has not happened before. It's been labelled the worst fire season ever recorded, an apocalypse, a nightmare, and like looking into the gates of hell. This has been the hottest and driest year on record in Australia. Several bushfires burning outside of Sydney have combined into what's being called a mega blaze. It's not really one large fire, but hundreds, if not thousands of smaller fires that started across various states along the southeastern coast of Australia. They travelled down the coast, just becoming more immense and ferocious. Officials Friday warned the bushfire was too big to put out. There were over 100 fires burning in the state. And so these fires have created smog and smoke haze.

Sydney's skyline is renowned for being one of the most beautiful in the world, but it was far from its best today. You probably saw images of the harbour totally covered in smoke. That iconic Sydney harbour view that we all know and love virtually made invisible by this thick smoke haze. In Canberra, the air pollution was recorded as the worst in the world, worse than Delhi even. Pollution levels in some parts more than 17 times above hazardous levels,

while major landmarks, including Parliament House, are barely visible through the smoke. And some estimates put these fires at more than eight times larger than those in California that wiped out the town of Paradise. Emergency officials warn that for some communities, if they wait too long, they might not be able to get out. They've destroyed nearly 2,000 homes at this point. Residents are coming to terms with shuttered livelihoods. The amount of work that was put into this place to make it the home it is

and then to lose it in one night with a fire. Nationally, 28 people have lost their lives. Thousands of people have had to evacuate their homes and are camping in these relief centres. They don't know if their homes are standing or not standing. It is now estimated that over one billion animals have been lost in wildfires burning out of control in Australia. Those that are still out in the wild are desperate for water.

Volunteers are stepping in, helping any way they can. So beyond the scale, what is so unique about these fires is they're threatening an entire ecosystem. By some accounts, they've already wiped out at least half a billion animals. Lydia, of all the devastation that you just described, that figure is especially striking. It's almost hard to fathom half a billion animals dying from these fires. How is that possible? So what you have to understand about Australia is that we have this incredibly unique ecosystem. There are hundreds of species of animals that are endemic, so only found in

Australia, which include, you know, koalas, kangaroos, possums, wallabies, cockatoos, and many other types of bugs and other species. And increasingly, as we've built up the landscape, they've been pushed into these dense parts of bush, and that's what's burning. And what that means is that entire species of some of these animals could be wiped out in what some ecologists have described as a kind of biological Armageddon. In Australia, over the past few weeks, hundreds of koalas have been killed and large swaths of their habitat destroyed by raging bushfires. We're seeing images of singed koalas, dehydrated koalas and kangaroos emerging from the bush. Scores of people doing their best to rescue as many kangaroos, koalas

and other animals from the charred landscape. And one thing I was really interested in finding was someone who was coming face to face with this massive destruction of Australia's ecosystem. This is Susie. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Yeah. We met frequently.

Yes, we have. So last week, I drove out to Raymond Island in the southeastern part of the country to meet a woman named Susan Paulus, who's been going to great lengths to save these animals whose lives and habitats are being destroyed. I show up to this house on the island. Susie's staying at a friend's place. The house is in disarray. Her daughter's there, her friend's there.

There's a lot of things going on, kind of a manic energy. And there's this smell of hay and animals. And I go in and have a look in the living room and there are all these joeys, baby kangaroos. Have you ever had joeys in your living room before? Never. No, this is a first. There's blankets and hay on the floor

and so we're sitting in this living room with kangaroos. One of them's poking its head out and having a look around. So the first one that you've got here. That's Pluto. And this is Riley. And so he's about eight months. I mean, so that's obviously not these animals' natural habitat. So how did they end up in this living room?

Right. So they normally live at a wildlife shelter that Susie runs, which is about 30 miles inland in the bush. Because what Susie does for a living is she rehabilitates and releases animals that have been orphaned or injured back into the wild. And she starts to tell us the story of these fires. Evacuating the animals was certainly challenging at the time because we knew the fire was burning. A few weeks ago, she starts hearing that this bushfire

is approaching her house. It's getting closer and closer, but it's not so close that the authorities are telling her to evacuate. They said it would be OK to stay the night and go the next morning. And then Susie and her daughter, who's 11, are outside and they look at the horizon and they see this weird orange glow. And at that point, we're standing out there and you could see the glow right around the whole ridge. Her daughter asks her, is that the fire? Lily made a comment to say, mum, is that the fire?

Is the fire there? And I said, no, no. And Susie says, no, no, no, that would be way too close. So they go back into the house, they start getting ready for bed, and then Susie gets a call. It's the CFA, which is the State Fire Authority. I got a phone call at 1.30 in the morning from the CFA to tell me shit's happening. And they tell her the fire is approaching.

You know, you either stay now and bunker down for this big fire front or you're going to have to go now. And that's when it clicks. That red glow she saw, it was the fire. So we were just like, whoa. The next I rang, they started evacuating animals. They wrap the kangaroos in blankets, put the koalas in baskets, put the chickens in boxes and they drive down in this bizarre convoy.

The total number that you evacuated with, 11 koalas, 15 kangaroos. Two possums. Two possums. One bird. 11 koalas, 15 kangaroos, possums, a lorikeet, two dogs, chickens. That's all I've got, I think that's it. And they go down from the bush to the coast. kangaroos, possums, a lorikeet, two dogs, chickens. And they go down from the bush to the coast, to this island, where several of Susie's friends have agreed to house these animals while the fires are blazing. Amazing.

So, Livia, how is everyone managing, especially the animals, being suddenly all together in this house? Well, it's not ideal. These animals are, they're wild animals. They're stressed. They don't like being locked up in a bedroom. And this is why Susie is really eager to get home. And while I'm there, there's this lull in the fires, and Susie decides this would be a good time to go back and check the property

to assess the scale of the damage. So we hop into the car and we're driving out to her property. We drive up this road which is officially closed. It's raining and the rain has turned the ash to this kind of sludge on the road and we're driving through miles and miles of blackened forest. How are you feeling seeing all of this? It's bad. The eucalyptus trees don't have leaves on them. Some of them have fallen over. Susie rolls down the window to make sure that we hear the cracks of any trees that might fall over and hit the car. You've heard the sound of cracking timber before? I have. Really? A tree fell down?

Yeah. Someone died on you. Oh my gosh. So this is a pretty hairy drive. It's really slippery. The forest is totally decimated and there's an eerie smoke haze hanging over everything. At some point, we're at this turn in the road filled with managum trees, which is a type of eucalypt that have been totally decimated

and Susie starts crying. Why? This was her koala feed. My koala, my koala feed here, my koala. It was absolutely alive. This is where she used to collect leaves for her animals that she was rehabilitating and she doesn't know where she's going to get it from anymore.

So even if she moves the animals back, she doesn't know how she's going to get it from anymore. So even if she moves the animals back, she doesn't know how she'll feed them. We continue driving to the property at her home and finally we arrive and... Wow. Healthy green grass. It's incredible. It's like...

Wow. That green grass. It's incredible. It's like, wow. That's just amazing. After miles and miles of burnt forest, we're finally in this place, and it's a lush, green oasis that has miraculously survived these fires. Even Susie isn't quite sure how it survived. She's somehow been spared.

Yeah, and one of the reasons is because there's been someone looking out for her land. There's this friend. Hey there. Nice to meet you. This is Jason. He's the brave one. A guy named Jason who's stuck around even when everyone else evacuated, even when the flames were yards high and threatening the property and his life.

were yards high and threatening the property and his life. What was it like being here on your own, surrounded by fire in the bush? That must have been terrifying. Yeah, I had my moments. So despite the evacuation notices, despite what the authorities were saying, Jason decided that he was going to stay and defend her property. The flames here, they were up the trees. Wow. He's filling up a tanker with water.

He's got a hose and a pump and he's desperately trying to ward off these flames, which are meters high. Because I just didn't want these trees to fall because they're so tall. He's frantically trying to protect Susie's property, this place where she keeps these animals, when it just becomes too much. Were you afraid for your life? I was a little, just because I didn't know what it was going to do. It was scary.

And at the last minute, he hears this sound. Then I heard a helicopter and he's just hovering around, hovering around. And then he just stayed around and I was like, that's good. And then all of a sudden I heard another helicopter. It was another small one. And then they both were hovering around. And then, yeah, the big one turned up. It's a water bomber, an aircraft that can drop massive amounts of water and one of these water bombers soaks her property and saves it. So you're the hero that defended the property. How does it feel? Oh, it's good to still stand, you know, that it's still here.

Wow. So she got incredibly lucky. Right. But even now, they're not completely in the clear. There are still some spot fires. There's this one log that is just persistently on fire. And even if Susie takes her animals back, she can't be sure that another fire won't come.

And this time, maybe she won't be as lucky. Livia, you're describing a series of Good Samaritans who have risked a lot to save these animals, but the problem, I have to imagine, is far greater than any number of Good Samaritans could possibly solve. Right. I mean, these people are battling these immense changes to Australia's landscape on a tiny, tiny scale,

and they can't save Australia's wildlife on their own, but it is mainly volunteers who are battling these blazes and their impacts, and that touches on a deep frustration throughout the country that I've seen in my reporting that it's falling on people like Jason, like Susie, to protect Australia in this disaster and that the government of Australia isn't doing enough. Australia isn't doing enough. We'll be right back. So, Livia, you said that the work of fighting these enormous fires has really fallen on individuals like Susie,

and that there's a sense that the government isn't doing enough. So what exactly has the government been doing? So a number of weeks ago, these posters of the prime minister, this man named Scott Morrison, began to pop up around Australia and online as a kind of meme. They said, missing, your country is on fire. The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, is getting hammered tonight for quietly going on a holiday to Hawaii while large parts of the nation burn. It starts to emerge that maybe the Prime Minister

is away on vacation. We don't really know where he is. And then these pictures start to circulate online where he appears to be on the beach in Hawaii. Protesters will gather at the Prime Minister's Sydney residence this morning claiming Scott Morrison is missing in action. No more must go! At a time when the country needs leadership on bushfires and smoke haze.

And people are really pissed off. I'm angry. I'm angry. We're really angry. But it's not just about this vacation. We're really angry that these people are denying, continuously denying climate change. What people are really upset about is the Prime Minister's attitude toward the environment and climate change and his beholdence to coal.

And what exactly do you mean by that, his beholdence to coal? So Australia has always had this really intimate relationship with coal. We're the world's largest exporter of it. The government is highly supported by the coal industry and both parties take donations from the coal industry. So there's this intimate connection between coal and government in Australia. It's a part of our identity and has been for a long time. But increasingly, there's this climate war growing in Australia

where because we're one of the most vulnerable developed nations to the impacts of climate change, people are increasingly growing tired of this connection to coal. We are living in a dangerous climate and it is time for our Prime Minister to get out of the pockets of the coal and gas lobby groups and to start thinking about the future of Australians. But on the other side, we do have those who still believe

that it's integral to our identity, that the economy would collapse if we didn't have it. 55,000 jobs depend on our coal mining industry. And as far as the Prime Minister goes, he's certainly on the side of the coal industry. I'm not going to support those running around Queensland trying to steal people's jobs. And how has this climate debate going on in Australia

and the Prime Minister's approach to it factored into how he has responded to these fires? So when these fires start in September, Mr Morrison is really slow to respond. I would like to go and provide direct personal support to people as they're suffering. But at the same time, we don't want to hamper or in any way frustrate the firefighting effort and the support efforts that are in place. There's no federal government response really at all. And the way that Australia fights fires is primarily with volunteers. And as these fires become more and more intense,

these firefighters are becoming fatigued. But the Prime Minister says he's not going to pay them. Australia is very well placed and positioned to deal with these types of disasters. The coordination and the relationships that have been built up between our state agencies is simply outstanding. And I've seen it on display. He says this is an issue for the states and not the federal government. Public anger has risen after two volunteer firefighters were killed battling bushfires sweeping the east coast. Then two firefighters die. A heartbreaking scene as their colleagues comfort each other in a time of incredible sadness.

So word gets out that the Prime Minister's on this vacation in Hawaii. The Prime Minister has caved tonight, rushing back from Hawaii amid criticism for taking a holiday while Sydney burns. And he finally holds a press conference. I want to start by extending my sincere condolences and sympathies once again. He agrees to pay the volunteer firefighters $6,000 Australian dollars each. I also want to acknowledge the outstanding work that is being done. And he does this really

big thing. The HMS Adelaide, the Navy's largest amphibious ship, has been readied to join the HMS Adelaide, the Navy's largest amphibious ship, has been readied to join HMS Choles and the MV Sycamore in supporting evacuation of citizens from fire-affected areas along our coastline. He says he's going to deploy the Navy to evacuate people. The best response I can provide to people who are feeling angry and people who are feeling isolated, to people who are fearful and afraid, is to do what I'm doing today. And some say this is the biggest maritime evacuation Australia has ever seen. And since returning from this unfortunately timed vacation

and really engaging with the response to these fires, what has the prime minister said about the connection between the fires and climate change? As these fires have intensified, and so has the pressure from the public and from journalists, he's been forced to address climate change head on. There is no argument about the links between broader issues of global climate change and weather events around

the world. But I'm sure people equally would acknowledge that the direct connection to any single fire event, it's not a credible suggestion to make that link. And what he said is that he's always believed in climate change, but that it's impossible to link events like the bushfires to any one regulation or policy of a specific country. So we must take action on climate change and we'll do it without economy wrecking or job destroying reckless targets. We'll do it with sensible targets that gets the balance right. And so there's this real divide here between those who see the bushfires in Australia as some kind of natural disaster, as a tragedy, and those who see it as a turning point in the conversation about climate change. Right, because a tragedy would not be preventable. It's just a horrible thing that you experience

and you mourn. Whereas a turning point in a case of these fires implies that what's being mourned here becomes a call to action to prevent this from happening again. Yeah, I think for those people who are experiencing these impacts firsthand, and for those who are watching them play out online on their TVs around Australia, this is one of the first times we're really experiencing as a country what climate change feels and looks like, just how apocalyptic it can be and just how much our ecosystems can be devastated. And so for these people, they're really hoping that this is a moment where the government is finally going to act and change its policies around this issue.

going to act and change its policies around this issue. Lydia, how much more can we expect from these fires? And as Australia tries to put them out, have people like Susie been able to return to their homes and basically start rebuilding their lives? and basically start rebuilding their lives. So since I visited Susie and there was this little lull in the fires, it's picked back up again. And whatever small amount of rain fell, authorities are saying really made no difference to the fires that are continuing to rage all along the coast.

And we've got weeks, if not months, left of them. Livia, thank you very much. Thank you. I think there's obviously a need for a national review of the response. And let's not forget the Royal Commission. Is that what you're talking about? I think that is what would be necessary, and I'll be taking a proposal through Cabinet to that end.

In an interview on Sunday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he would call for a high-level investigation into the government's handling of the country's bushfires, acknowledging the nation's deep frustration with the response. But in the interview, Morrison did not call for a significant shift in his government's policies towards carbon emissions. In the years ahead, we are going to continue to evolve our policy in this area to reduce emissions even further,

and we're going to do it without a carbon tax, without putting up electricity prices. So we're going to do it without a carbon tax, without putting up electricity prices. So you're going to do it without a carbon tax and putting up prices? And without shutting down traditional industries upon which regional Australians depend for their very livelihood. They do. That's what I hope you can answer. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. After a deliberate delay, House Speaker Nancy

Pelosi said she would transmit the articles of impeachment adopted by the House over to the Senate later this week, paving the way for the third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history. Pelosi had wagered that delaying the transmission would pressure Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hold a fairer trial with new witnesses. But McConnell now says he has enough votes to begin a trial without allowing for such witnesses, undercutting Pelosi's strategy and forcing her hand. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.