Firestorm

Greg Mullins followed his father into fighting bushfires – it was in the blood. He fought major fires around Sydney and the Blue Mountains for decades, and studied bushfires in Europe, Canada and the US. He risked his life in the 1994 Sydney fires and, later, during our catastrophic Black Summer of 2019–20. As a career firefighter, he worked his way up the ranks to become Commissioner of one of the world’s largest fire services, Fire and Rescue NSW, for nearly fourteen years. When it came to natural disasters there was little, if anything, he hadn’t witnessed first-hand. Over five decades he watched as weather patterns and natural disaster risks changed, seeing bushfires becoming bigger, hotter and more destructive. He talked to scientists and weighed their evidence with his experience, coming to the realisation that man-made global warming was setting the stage for a deadly firestorm. In early 2019 he tried to warn the government that a Black Summer was imminent so that adequate preparations could be made. . . But when he and former fire chiefs from across the country tried to meet with politicians to sound an urgent warning, they were ignored. Combining thrilling stories of what it’s like to be on the front line of Australia’s first giga-fire with the hard truths of human-caused climate change, Firestorm is a compelling account of raging fire, political evasion, settled science, and one man’s courageous, urgent call to action for all Australians.