'Nothing special' about fuel load last year

The NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub, which he heads, delivered 18 reports to the inquiry on last summer's devastating fires.

Professor Bradstock said it was clear that hazard reduction burning close to properties was successful - so there would likely be more of it.

Read more: Traumatised Kangaroo Valley residents prepare for another fire season

But he pointed to the inquiry's finding that fuel loads across NSW weren't necessarily higher than they had been for the past 30 years - meaning a lack of pre-burning had not been the reason the fires raged so hard and long.

"We gave the inquiry 18 reports which cover all these issues [including] the preconditions for the season," he said.

"We looked at the dryness, we looked at the fire weather during the season ... we wanted to try and pinpoint the causes of why these fires were just unprecedented in size.

"The first question we asked was: were the fuel loads abnormally high? We were able to conduct a statewide analysis looking back over the past 30 years, and it showed the trend in fuel loads over time goes up and down a little bit ... but there was nothing special about last year.

"Leading up to the season fuel loads were on average no higher across the state than other seasons going back to 1990.

"But things were critically dry, and homogeneously dry, over vast areas, which creates a template for fires to be unleashed over vast areas."

The number of high-danger days in between the catastrophic days was another main factor.

"The days and weeks in between the peaks never really dropped down ... so the fires just rolled on and on and never stopped."

It wasn't a lack of hazard reduction efforts ...

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