Best of 2025 - ‘Disaster season’: What is that? |
Anika Wells, in announcing a meeting with three telco giants to discuss Optus’s Triple Zero emergency call system catastrophe in September, referred to the need for Australians to have confidence in the system before the coming “disaster season”. By that she meant summer. Is there really such a season?
A repost from 9 October 2025
Yes, there is. But we shouldn’t over-state its existence, and we must recognise that weather-related agents of disaster, including bushfires and floods, are not limited to short periods. Tropical cyclones, too, can strike well after the end of summer, and severe thunderstorms bringing large hail and damaging winds likewise can occur at any time. We are talking here about frequency of occurrence at different times of year, not weather-related disasters being possible only in a particular few months.
Take bushfires. They begin in the far north of Australia, mainly in June and July. Their season of principal occurrence gets later the further south you go, with March and April being months of strong risk in Tasmania.
But lately things have blurred: our worst-ever bushfires during “Black Summer” (2019-20) started near Port Macquarie in July and homes were being lost in numbers by early September, well before the official start of the New South Wales Bushfire Danger Period on 1 October. So Black Summer was actually black Winter, Spring and Summer, and major fires burned........