Fire and Emergency New Zealand is asking people across the country’s driest eastern districts to start getting their properties ready for what could be a long and difficult wildfire season, with forecasters now almost certain that one of the strongest El Niño events on record is building in the Pacific.
Wildfire manager Tim Mitchell told RNZ’s Nine to Noon on Friday that Canterbury, Marlborough, Central Otago, Wairarapa, Hawke’s Bay and the Gisborne district were the places most likely to face trouble. Every El Niño behaves a little differently, but Fire and Emergency’s analysis of five previous El Niño seasons pointed to the east of both islands, the central North Island and Northland seeing stretches of very high fire danger.
Mitchell said the hard part this early in the season was working out exactly where and when the risk would bite, and that the outcome depended heavily on the public rather than on the forecast.
“We can actually live with quite high risk without necessarily seeing fires but it’s very dependent on the public in terms of heeding those warnings, doing the preparation and doing the activities that then avoids those fires starting,” he said.
The warning follows the latest Seasonal Climate Outlook from Earth Sciences New Zealand, released on 31 July, which put the chance of El Niño conditions continuing through August to October at 100 percent. The agency said El Niño conditions in the tropical Pacific ocean and atmosphere had strengthened further, with the strongest atmospheric measurements on record for a July. It now rates the chance of the event reaching or exceeding very strong intensity at 90 percent, with peak conditions and the biggest impacts most likely during the 2026-27 summer.
For the eastern regions that matters mostly through soil moisture. Earth Sciences New Zealand expects rainfall in Gisborne, Hawke’s Bay and Wairarapa to be about equally likely to come in below normal or near normal, with soil moisture and river flows leaning the same way. Coastal Canterbury and east Otago are about equally likely to be warmer than average or near average, again with rainfall tilted low. The West Coast of the South Island is the outlier and is most likely to be wetter than usual, which is the classic El Niño pattern of westerly winds dumping rain on one side of the main divide and drying out the other.
Mitchell said Earth Sciences New Zealand had indicated the westerly pattern would begin around September, although when the ground actually dries out is harder to pin down. That timing is what worries him most, because an early season catches people who are still thinking about winter jobs rather than fire risk.
“The risk of these winds coming in a little bit earlier than we might typically see them during spring and a little bit stronger than perhaps what they might otherwise be is those can catch people out and that’s what can then cause a fire to start and spread,” he said.
Wind does more damage than heat in a New Zealand fire. Mitchell pointed to the Foehn effect, where air is forced across a mountain range and arrives on the other side warm and dry, as one of the mechanisms that lets a fire run. He said the landscape does not even have to look parched for that to happen.
“It doesn’t always need to be super dry for that to occur. We can get what we call wind-driven fires, where it actually looks pretty green but what the fire’s doing is pushing those hot embers some considerable distance ahead of the fire and it will find those receptive fuels, whether it’s a shelter belt, whether it’s a hay barn or something else, which will ignite and then spread,” he said.
That is also why the New Zealand problem is different from the fires filling news bulletins from Europe, Canada and the United States. Overseas, a single dry lightning storm can start hundreds of fires in a day. Here, almost every fire has a person behind it.
“They’ll get a couple of hundred fires start in a day based on a dry lightning storm … where 98 percent of our fires in New Zealand are caused by people,” Mitchell said.
The single most common cause at the moment is not arson or a careless cigarette but an ordinary fire that was never properly put out, then fanned back into life days later.
“We have been well caught out. It’s actually our most common cause of wildfires in New Zealand at the moment, people not extinguishing fires and then those fires being flared up by winds afterwards,” he said. Anyone who lights a fire should soak it with water until it is cold, he said.
The preparation Fire and Emergency is asking for is unglamorous and cheap. Clear vegetation away from buildings now, including storm debris that will dry out into fuel by December. Keep on top of grass growth rather than letting it cure off over spring. Make sure a fire appliance can physically get up the driveway, that the rural property number at the gate is visible from the road, and that there is a water supply firefighters can draw on. Households in fire-prone areas are also advised to have a plan for what they will do and to favour less flammable species when they plant.
Before lighting anything outdoors, people can check the local fire danger level and whether their area is in an open, restricted or prohibited fire season through the Check It’s Alright website. A restricted season means a permit is needed for an open air fire. A prohibited season means no open air fires at all.
Mitchell said he was confident there was enough local expertise to manage a bad season, and that the skill base had been strengthened by the number of New Zealand firefighters sent overseas who come home having worked on much bigger and more complex fires. Five had been sent to the United States, he said, with another 60 in the process of being deployed and more likely to follow in coming weeks.
Those crews are part of a joint Australia and New Zealand deployment that arrived in the American Pacific Northwest in late July. Public broadcaster KLCC in Oregon reported on 29 July that international specialists were working alongside Californian crews on fires including the Castle Fire in the Umpqua National Forest, which was started by lightning on 22 July, and the much larger Akawa Butte Fire north of Sisters. New Zealand’s contribution is weighted towards planning, intelligence, aviation co-ordination and incident leadership rather than crews on the fire line.
New Zealanders do not have to look far back for a reminder of what a wind-driven fire can do to a city. The Port Hills above Christchurch burned again in February 2024, forcing evacuations on the edge of the suburbs, and helicopters were bombing a fire in the Mackenzie Basin near Lake Pukaki in August 2020. Both sat in the same eastern belt now being flagged for the coming summer.
With the fire season potentially opening as early as September, the practical message from Fire and Emergency is that the work worth doing is the work done before the first hot northwesterly arrives.
Are you doing anything differently on your place this year ahead of what looks like a hot dry summer, or have you been through a wildfire yourself? Leave a comment below and tell us what you have learned.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply