Despite the rise of headline-grabbing megafires, fewer fires are burning worldwide now than at any time since antiquity. But this isn’t good news – in banishing fire from sight, we have made its dangers stranger and less predictable

The hundreds of bush fires that hit southern Australia on 7 February 2009 felt, according to witnesses, apocalyptic. It was already hellishly hot that day: 46.4C in Melbourne. As the fires erupted, day turned to night, flaming embers the size of pillows rained down, burning birds fell from the trees and the ash-filled air grew so hot that breathing it, one survivor said, was like “sucking on a hairdryer”. More than 2,000 homes burned down, and 173 people died. New South Wales’s fire chief, visiting Melbourne days later, encountered “shocked, demoralised” firefighters, racked by “feelings of powerlessness”.

Australians call the event Black Saturday – a scorched hole in the national diary. There, it contends with Red Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Black Thursday, Black Friday and Black Sunday on Australia’s calendar of conflagration. But recently it has been surpassed – they all have – by the Black Summer, the cataclysmic 2019-20 fire season that killed hundreds with its smoke and burned an area the size of Ireland. A study estimated that the bushfires destroyed or displaced 3 billion animals; its stunned lead author couldn’t think of any fire worldwide that had killed nearly so many.