Bushfires

There are out-of-control fires burning across northern Victoria, Australia, with more than 170,000 hectares consumed so far. There is an update in today’s The Age and also a photo gallery which can be accessed from the main page.

Yesterday I phoned Max Rheese a friend and colleague from Benalla. He said he was OK and that he would send me a note for the blog about the fires:

“Seven days ago, on Friday December 1, I relaxed in the family room of my home in Benalla in North East Victoria and watched the first of the summer thunderstorms pass overhead. I witnessed the lightning strike in the nearby ranges that started the first of fifty fires to be ignited by that thunderstorm. A week later I sit in the same room and cannot see more than 200 metres into the paddocks because of the thick smoke that has enveloped Benalla from the still burning fires.

A total of 150,000 hectares of mainly native forest has been burnt in the past week. Tomorrow the forecast temperature is 39 degrees with northerly winds and dire predictions of impending disaster by everyone from Premier Bracks to the local hairdresser. Speculation of 600,000 hectares being burnt by the end of next week are reported.

A distinct feeling of déjà vu pervades, as North East Victoria went through the same sort of event in the Alpine fires of 2003 where 1.1 million hectares of mainly public land was burnt in 59 days of inferno that was unequalled, in area burnt, since Black Friday in January 1939.

It is difficult to comprehend for many people that we should be facing a potential holocaust this summer after the very recent disastrous fires of 2003. Ample evidence was presented at a number of inquiries into the 2003 fires that a lack of prescribed burning over a twenty year period had increased the fuel load in many areas of the high country of Victoria.

Athol Hodgson, a former chief fire officer for the then Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands presented submissions to the inquiries that followed the 2003 fires detailing the lack of prescribed burning over the previous two decades. This was not disputed.

The following is an extract of a paper that Hodgson delivered to The Eureka Forum in Ballarat in 2004:

Another top priority is to restore prescribed burning programs in forests. Immediately after the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983 the Government injected $1 million extra into the programs effectively doubling the money available for field staff to do the work. Yet the programs crashed. In 1992 the Auditor General found that the Department of Conservation and Environment had failed to achieve its planned fuel-reduction targets in three consecutive seasons and that those areas the Department identified as warranting the highest level of protection to human life, property and public assets received the lowest level of protection. And in 2003 the Auditor General found that since 1994, fuel reduction burning has never met the Department’s planning and operational fuel-reduction targets. In allowing that to happen, the Department ignored the truism heralded by Judge Stretton in 1939, repeated by Sir Esler Hamilton Barber in 1977 and further reinforced by the Miller Report on the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983, that fire prevention must be the paramount consideration of the forest manager.

The Government and the Department must lift their game. They must do so, not only in places where the priority is to protect life and assets. Those places are a very small proportion of the forest estate and to concentrate on them to the exclusion of the rest of the forests will lead inevitably to more feral fires. Prescribed burning has been done successfully in the past on broad areas to create forest diversity and reduce the damaging effects of wildfires. The practice had little community and no political support from the mid-1980’s until 2003 and was the reason why fuel management programs crashed in that era. That support must be won and the practice reinstated in our forests in a safe way.

…”that fire prevention must be the paramount consideration of the forest manager”.

This is not rocket science, but we as a community have lost the plot. We are so busy embracing the notion of protecting our forests that we cannot see the forest for the trees.

For goodness sake! How many times do we have to go through this before we get it right?

Figures supplied by the Department of Sustainability and Environment [responsible for fire management on public land] to the Auditor General show that 127,000 hectares were burnt in 2004 – 2005 in prescribed burns. This very mediocre total was one year after the disastrous Alpine fires of 2003. This is well below the 10 year average for burns of 200,000 hectares and even further behind the high points of prescribed burning in the 1980’s where totals of upto 450,000 were burnt one year and over 300,000 hectares were burnt in several other years.

We need to stop the blame game, encourage the Victorian government to adopt a proper scientific regime of sufficient prescribed burning that will deliver confidence in the management of native forests to lessen the impacts of fires in years of severe drought such as this year.

Governments and the community must accept that there is inherent risk in prescribed burning and that occassionally a burn will escape. To not accept this risk and to be overly prescriptive with protocols for burning operations will result in the situation that country Victorians will face this weekend; multiple uncontrolled wildfires in areas that have not had fuel reduction burns for many years.

Max Rheese
Executive Director, Australian Environment Foundation “

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My thoughts are with the communities in northern Victoria and also the communities of forest animals.

“Part of bushfire fighting culture is that you control lightning strikes by 10 o’clock the next morning or you are in trouble. We have done that over the years and we have done it successfully. We had not lost them before. But nobody seemed to want to put these out. I do not know why. I keep asking myself why, in the middle of January, in the middle of a drought and with the highest fuel loads ever, nobody seemed to want to put those fires out. It is just sickening.”

Val Jeffrey was referring to the January 2003 fires that went on to burn 3 million hectares of south eastern Australia including much of Kosciousko National Park.

According to two new blog posts at HenryThornton.com,

“This summers’ fire season is not yet over but we hope not to see a major fire in the [Victorian] Otways.

The Victorian Government must urgently learn the lessons from 2003 that have not been learnt in the Grampians and Brisbane Ranges, and must apply improved practices to the management of the Otways and other parks in Victoria.”

Read more,

http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=3893
and

http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=3892.

Jim Hoggett milks goats at his farm west of Gloucester in northern eastern NSW, he is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, and he had the feature letter in last week’s The Land (16th February). It read:

Last weekend we had the routine “alleged illegal land clearing” scare in the Sydney Morning Herald, fostered by the Wilderness Society. It was alleged that the equivalent of 6 Sydney Cricket Ground pitches were being illegally cleared in NSW every hour of every day.

The greatest threat to nature in NSW is not scrub clearing in the central West. It is fire, especially fire in the National Parks.

In the few weeks prior to the SMH report an area perhaps 10 times the area of alleged illegal clearing went up in wildfires across the eastern States. And the season is not over yet. To use the much loved
Green cricket pitch analogy, that is the equivalent of 60 Sydney Cricket Grounds every hour of every day. The difference is that the fires consume the pristine, national heritage, wilderness rather than Central-Western scrub.

And this is as nothing to the 2003 fires (900 cricket grounds per hour for NSW and the ACT alone) where the jewels in the crown were burned to the ground – if that is not too mixed a metaphor.

I have not heard a peep out of the Wilderness Society about all this. Nor has anyone to my knowledge ever attempted to measure this truly massive, recurring ecological damage. Not to mention the annual risk
to the lives of firefighters. No doubt there is a lot of silent hand wringing but I hear no solutions.

And we will no doubt find that much of the alleged illegal clearing was of regrowth. The interval between the two photos in the SMH report was only 3 years. So much of the area may well have been previously cleared. Perhaps we could direct the satellite to take a survey of reafforestation in NSW. We might well find that the total area and density of NSW native vegetation has actually increased with regrowth and forest thickening. Let’s look at the stock as well as the flow.

What is the net gain/loss?

Even better, instead of spending millions of dollars on satellites to spy on its own citizens, government could divert the money to programs which would prevent the mass destruction of our fauna and flora. Then we could possible simplify the absurdly restrictive Native Vegetation Act and work on a program of serious fire mitigation in our Parks.

Incidentally, the alleged illegal clearing amounted to less than one hundredth of one per cent of the area of NSW.

…………….

Republished with permission from Jim Hoggett.

I wonder how many Koalas have been burnt in the bushfires raging across Victoria?

I received a letter from Roger Underwood today, he writes, “Arsonists do light fires, but they are not responsible for fires becoming large and damaging, especially forest fires. Blaming them is a convenient way for politicians and land managers to avoid taking responsibility themselves, which they should.”

Roger Underwood has over 40 years experience of bushfire management in Australia and overseas. He was formerly General Manager of The Deparment of Conservation and Land Management (CALM) in Western Australia, a regional and district manager, a research manager and bushfire specialist.

Dear Jennifer

I have been watching TV and reading newspaper reports on the recent (and ongoing) disastrous bushfires in Victoria and Western Australia. One common thread is the attempt to blame “arsonists, thought to be responsible for the fires”.

There are two non-debatable things about arson: (i) it has always been with us and will always be with us, as it is an expression of anti-social, criminal or sick human behaviour; and (ii) since arson-lit fires cannot be prevented, we should expect them to occur and take the necessary measures to minimise their impact, not whinge about them.

The ultimate irony to me was to see our Acting Premier promising large sums of money as a reward for information about the supposed arsonist, when the government in which he is a Minister has overseen a massive decline in the capacity of the State’s bushfire management resources.

Bushfires cannot be prevented.

On the other hand we can predict with great accuracy where and when they will occur and we can put in place very effective measures to minimise the damage they cause, and to increase the ease and safety of their control. In the publicly-owned forest, these measures are relatively simple.

In the first place we need a sound policy, and the strong support of government and agencies – this is a matter of simple, good governance and responsible public service.

In the second place we need a resource of permanent well trained and well equipped staff who can undertake fire management, supported by a well-funded volunteer firefighter force. Third, we need effective programs of green burning in our parks and forests, to reduce fuels and to ensure that fires do not become large, intense and unstoppable. Finally we need rural people, including those living at the interface, to take responsibility for making their own properties less hazardous or vulnerable, and if they won’t do it voluntarilly, they must be forced to do it compulsorily.

None of this is new. But for some reason it does not happen. Worse, we seem to be going backwards. I agree with those who blame the environmentalists for antagonism or fear of green burning – they have very successfully created a generation of young people who do not understand the role of fire in Australian ecosystems – but they are not solely to blame.

The political leaders who show no leadership, or who try to slip out from under by blaming the arsonists are also contemptible, but politicians are politicians, and we cannot expect them to behave out of character. I am also very disappointed with some of the new breed of braided Fire Chiefs who tend to see bushfires as theatre, and whose media popularity would be threatened by a fire management system which resulted in fewer fire disasters. But these people are simply a product of the media-dominated world in which we live,and they won’t go away any more than will the arsonists.

I conclude that the real villains in the piece are our professional land managers – the people who are today in charge of our national parks and State forests. They are well aware of the ecological research, they know about the decline in forest health in areas subjected to fire exclusion, they have staff in the field who are skilled in and enthusiastic about green burning, they have media and communications units, and they are in a position to influence government policy and priorities, to fight for a position which is right, even if it is politically unpopular. But they do not appear to be prepared to fight for good and effective fire management, and the result is an increasing number of large, high intensity fires which do no-one any good, and cause immense environmental damage.

The situation in WA is made more difficult by the fact that our land management agency (CALM) is not responsible for preparing the park and forest management plans which they are required to implement. The government has placed responsibilityfor management planning in the hands of a part-time committee of citizens and academics called The Conservation Commission, not one single member of which has any scientific expertise or professional experience in bushfire management or forest firefighting.

A thousand new arson detectives in every state will not catch every arsonist or potential arsonist, nor will they stop arson occurring in the future. What is needed is a new breed of tough, dedicated professional land managers who accept arson as inevitable, like lightning, and work to put in place a system which ensures that when fires start we can deal with them before people are killed, lovely forests incinerated and farms destroyed. What the government needs to do is to put these people in charge, chop off the influence of committees of well-meaning amateurs, and provide policy and political support.

Will this happen? The Bushfire Front developed a template for Best Practice in Bushfire Management in WA which, in early 2005, we sent to the Premier and the Minister for the Environment, together with an analysis of where WA needed to take steps to halt the decline in the standard of fire management, and to get the whole show back on the road. This submission was the outcome of several months work by experienced bushfire managers and former fire scientists. Neither the Premier nor the Minister replied.

Roger Underwood
The Bushfire Front WA Inc

According to ABC Online news:

Up to 20 properties are feared destroyed or damaged by fires across Victoria, with a number of communities in the state’s west and east under threat.

At least three homes have burnt down near Anakie, west of Melbourne, after a lightning strike started a fire that destroyed more than 6,000 hectares of the Brisbane ranges.

Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) chief fire officer Andrew Greystone says the fire behaviour has prevented crews from assessing further damage.

“We believe that there have been houses and or property lost in the Brisbane ranges and in the Grampians,” he said.

The Grampians fire at Mt Lubra in the west has covered more than 100,000 hectares and threatened the towns of Moyston, Pomonal, Halls Gap and Stawell.

In Gippsland in the east, a deliberately-lit blaze now at 10,000 hectares, has left Moondarra under ember attack and continues to threaten Erica, Rawson and Tyres.

In the north-east, the towns of Yea, Kinglake and Glenburn should maintain ember patrols.

Crews are racing to have the fires contained before Thursday’s return to 40 degree Celsius temperatures.

I have just found and re-read my copy of a speech given by Athol Hodgson in December 2004 at the Eureka Forum in Ballarat. It includes some history and some advice:

The fire event in 1985 when lightning started 111 fires in a pattern similar to the fire event in 2003 is one valid benchmark for learning. The 1985 campaign lasted 14 days and confined the Alpine fires to 50000 ha without the help of rain. It involved 2,000 Departmental, 500 CFA, 449 Armed Services, 120 timber industry and 50 SEC personnel; 75 bulldozers, 400 fire tankers and 36 aircraft. In the aftermath, debriefs were held without rancor or political interference and there was no call for an Inquiry into the event.

In 1985 there was a large work-force of experienced firefighters working in the forests. It included people working on hydro-electricity projects; tree fellers, sniggers and log carters employed by the timber industry; graziers; forest workers building fire access tracks, maintaining roads and tracks, and picking seed for forest regeneration and forest officers supervising forest licensees, forest works and planning autumn prescribed burning for forest regeneration and fuel reduction. That work-force and the vehicles and equipment it used daily in the forests was immediately available on 14 January 1985. A work-force of similar size and experience in fighting fires in the Alpine forests was not immediately available for fire fighting in January 2003.

A top priority for Government to ensure good forest fire management is to put a bigger and permanent workforce into the parks and State forests do the things that must to be done to sustain healthy and diverse forest ecosystems. That workforce must have skills, transport, tools and machinery capable of managing multiple ignitions from lightning as was done in 1985. It is not absolutely necessary to reverse land use decisions to do this but it is necessary to change some current land management practices. The workforce must have a mission appropriate for the approved land use. In parks, the mission must include controlling feral animals, weeds, erosion, keeping access tracks in a condition where they are easily maintained, collecting seed and revegetating damaged sites, planning and conducting prescribed burns and controlling unplanned fires. In State forests where commercial use of vegetation is permitted the mission must include all the above and additional tasks appropriate to the commercial operation.

Another top priority is to restore prescribed burning programs in forests. Immediately after the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983 the Government injected $1 million extra into the programs effectively doubling the money available for field staff to do the work. Yet the programs crashed. In 1992 the Auditor General found that the Department of Conservation and Environment had failed to achieve its planned fuel-reduction targets in three consecutive seasons and that those areas the Department identified as warranting the highest level of protection to human life, property and public assets received the lowest level of protection. And in 2003 the Auditor General found that since 1994, fuel reduction burning has never met the Department’s planning and operational fuel-reduction targets. In allowing that to happen, the Department ignored the truism heralded by Judge Stretton in 1939, repeated by Sir Esler Hamilton Barber in 1977 and further reinforced by the Miller Report on the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983, that fire prevention must be the paramount consideration of the forest manager. The Government and the Department must lift their game. They must do so, not only in places where the priority is to protect life and assets. Those places are a very small proportion of the forest estate and to concentrate on them to the exclusion of the rest of the forests will lead inevitably to more feral fires. Prescribed burning has been done successfully in the past on broad areas to create forest diversity and reduce the damaging effects of wildfires. The practice had little community and no political support from the mid-1980’s until 2003 and was the reason why fuel management programs crashed in that era. That support must be won and the practice reinstated in our forests in a safe way.

These two priorities will cost money in large amounts. Victorians must anticipate that contributions to forest fire management from forest industries by way of royalties or in kind will not in the future, be as great as in the mid-1980’s. And visitor fees and similar charges are ‘petty cash’ compared to the many millions of dollars needed to sustain local and largely permanent workforces in rural communities close to where they are needed most. But Victoria’s forests are an asset that requires to be valued by the community in the same way that any other asset is provided with a value that guides its management and protection. The intrinsic values of wilderness, water catchments, biodiversity, cultural sites and the like are valued by the community as much, and often more, as are tangibles like sawlogs and gravel. The community must insist that they be protected and be prepared to pay the cost. The challenge facing the community is to assemble information about forest fire that is based on science, tested by experience and then play it successfully in the political arena. Politicians of all political persuasions are sensitive to environmental issues involving water catchments, forests and fire. Governments will find money for causes supported by communities with political clout. The alternative is more feral fires.

You can read more about Athol Hodgson at Forest Fire Victoria Inc.