300 WEATHER, CLIMATE, AND SOCIETY VOLUME 2 Influence of Location, Population, and Climate on Building Damage and Fatalities due to Australian Bushfire: 1925-2009 RYAN P. CROMPTON, K. JOHN MCANENEY, AND KEPING CHEN Risk Frontiers, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia ROGER A. PIELKE JR. Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado KATHARINE HAYNES Risk Frontiers, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (Manuscript received 22 January 2010, in final form 16 July 2010) ABSTRACT This study reevaluates the history of building damage and loss of life due to bushfire (wildfire) in Australia since 1925 in light of the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria in which 173 people lost their lives and 2298 homes were destroyed along with many other structures. Historical records are normalized to estimate building damage and fatalities had events occurred under the societal conditions of 2008/09. There are re- lationships between normalized building damage and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean dipole phenomena, but there is no discernable evidence that the normalized data are being influenced by climatic change due to the emission of greenhouse gases. The 2009 Black Saturday fires rank second in terms of normalized fatalities and fourth in terms of normalized building damage. The public safety concern is that, of the 10 years with the highest normalized building damage, the 2008/09 bushfire season ranks third, behind the 1925/26 and 1938/39 seasons, in terms of the ratio of normalized fatalities to building damage. A feature of the building damage in the 2009 Black Saturday fires in some of the most affected towns-Marysville and Kinglake-is the large proportion of buildings destroyed either within bushland or at very small distances from it (<10 m). Land use planning policies in bushfire-prone parts of this country that allow such de- velopment increase the risk that bushfires pose to the public and the built environment. 1. Introduction Widely heralded in the media as Australia's worst natural disaster (e.g., Rule 2009), the 7 February 2009 Black Saturday bushfires (wildfires) in Victoria were but the most recent reminder of the potential for natural hazards to impact Australian communities (Crompton and McAneney 2008). Fueled by record high tempera- tures and high winds in the midst of a protracted drought, the Black Saturday fires claimed 173 lives and 2298 houses (Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission 2009) as well as numerous other structures, including schools and police stations. This paper attempts to place these most recent bushfire impacts into a historical context. Corresponding author address: Ryan P. Crompton, Risk Fron- tiers, Macquarie University, NSW, 2109, Australia. E-mail: ryan.crompton@mq.edu.au Following a method analogous to Crompton and McAneney (2008) and other recent work (Bouwer 2010), this paper asks: What would have been the impact of past bushfires if they were to recur under current societal conditions? Without accounting for the known influence societal factors have on disaster records, it is impossible to know whether the devastation inflicted by the Black Saturday fires was truly anomalous, whether this provides a glimpse