This issue has since been highlighted by the Royal Commission in its Interim Report, and is being taken to heart by fire authorities all over Australia. In Western Australia, for example, the Fire and Emergency Service (FESA) has rolled out a new warning arrangement based on mobile phones, and has carried out a substantial and well-publicised test in a Perth Hills suburb. It was said (by FESA) to have been a great success.

This is a delicate subject, because I don’t want to sound disrespectful to people who lost their lives or suffered in the Victorian fires. I realise that many people are perplexed by the way they were engulfed by fire and caught by surprise. I understand the desire of authorities to get warning systems in place. Officials realise that a failure to deal with this issue in future fires will come back to haunt them if complaints are made to Royal Commissions, Coronial inquiries and the media.

However, the downsides, weaknesses and dangers in bushfire warning systems must be properly understood. 

The first problem is that while the behaviour of bushfires burning at low intensity in light fuels is well understood, high intensity fires in heavy fuels can behave erratically. Intense fires generate their own wind and throw spot fires kilometres ahead. This is the main reason people are caught unawares. One minute the fire may well be “miles away”. But the next minute a high wind brings a rain of burning embers. If these fall into heavy dry fuels, people rapidly find themselves enveloped by fire. High intensity fires will leapfrog across one ridge to another, and then swirl back, sucked into the intervening valleys and seemingly coming from the “wrong direction”. A bushfire can move from a mild ground fire with 1-2 metre flames, to an intense crown fire (throwing spotfires) within a matter of minutes…. it is simply a matter of a wind change turning a long flank into a headfire, or of a fire moving from an area of light to an area of heavy fuels.

Very rapid changes in fire behaviour, and mass spotfire generation present a nightmare for people with the job of activating a warning system. Decisions can only be made with very accurate and up-to-date information from the fire. Since the situation at the fire is  often confused, and firefighters generally do not have any idea of the big picture, it makes decision-making about whether or when to activate a warning (and to whom) doubly difficult.

A further problem is that rarely do you get one fire at the one time, especially on a bad day. When there is a dry lightning storm, of where an arsonist is at his dirty work, it is not uncommon for several fires to start at about the same time and run parallel with each other. This can confuse efforts at fire detection, mapping, and spread prediction. When many separate fires start to coalesce and interact, fire prediction moves into the realms of the unknown, making it virtually impossible to know who to warn and when, other than in the broadest geographic sense.

Finally, any warning system based on communications technology is likely to break down in a serious bushfire situation. This is especially true of technologies that require mains electricity, which is generally the first to go when there is a fire, or static relay stations like phone towers that can be destroyed by fire or cyclonic winds. To this must be added the well-known problem of communications overload in a crisis situation.

There are two serious dangers with the whole concept of targeted warning systems. The first is that a mass warning will quite possibly lead to a mass evacution. People leaving the area will choke the roads, and these may well be the same roads on which there are incoming fire appliances. It is not clear to me that the authorities have sufficiently thought this issue through.

The second danger is that the authorities are raising expectations that they may not be able to fulfil. If people are expecting to get, and are waiting for a warning, and the warning does not arrive (for one reason or another), they are going to be set-up for calamity. I hate the idea of community and individual self-reliance being undermined.

To be effective and reliable, a bushfire warning system must meet a number of criteria. It must have access to accurate data on fire location, fuels and weather, together with the fire behaviour algorithms that can predict fire frontal development. It must be able to anticipate wind changes and instantly take on board new information from a fire where long-distance spotting is occurring. It must be flexible in responding to rapidly changing human as well as bushfire situations. There must be back-up in the event of a technological failure. Above all it must have a large and well-trained human resource to make everything work under extreme pressure, including very experienced and accountable decision-makers. A system meeting these requirements will be expensive to set up and maintain. It will also suffer steady degrade if a few years go by with no major fires.

It is will be the height of over-confidence to create an expectation in fire-prone communities that they will always receive timely warnings of imminent bushfires. The system will probably work under relatively mild weather and low fuel conditions. But the opposite will always be more likely when a killer bushfire is running. Then people will receive no warning, or warnings will be too late to enable appropriate actions.

There is another very real problem. This is when warnings are issued but are not followed by a fire. In the coming fire season or two we can expect that there will be a (wholly understandable) temptation to overdo the warnings. Fire officers with trigger fingers will not want to face a Coronial Court for failing to push the button. But if fires do not follow warnings, the result will be the “crying wolf syndrome” where people become blase, and then do not react when there really is a fire.

In my view the first priority for fire authorities should be to optimise the bushfire resilience of towns and communities – in particular reducing areas of heavy fuel within and adjoining residential areas, making houses and road verges safer, setting up local community refuge areas and maintaining a program of regular mild burning in hinterland forests. Secondly, they should be telling people that it is quite likely they will NOT be warned and that they must themselves take responsibility for finding out what is going on and having a sensible plan of action, including evacuation to a safe place well before a situation becomes remotely dangerous.  In my view both of these actions will have greater value than spending millions of dollars on “technological-fix” bushfire warning systems.

The fundamental message that our governments should be putting out is this: if you live in, or close to the Australian bush, you should expect to get a bushfire on a hot windy day in summer….. and be prepared for it. To rely on a government warning system is to rely on something that is inherently unreliable.

There is a final factor. As that wise anthropologist George Silberbauer has pointed out, we already have a system in which the Bureau of Meteorology puts out twice-daily fire danger forecasts and these are published on the net and broadcast on the news. Most country roads have Fire Danger warning signs. The problem is, few people understand fire danger, and the system is unduly complicated with six, and soon to be seven, categories. It is possible that if we had a more simple way of expressing the fire danger index, which is a warning in itself, and we ensured it was more effectively transmitted and better understood by the whole community, the new technological gizmos would not be needed.

Roger Underwood
http://bushfirefront.com.au/ 
August, 2009

Other articles by Roger Underwood: http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/author/roger-underwood/

I have now received a reply to my letter.  It was written by Ms Kerry Smith, an Assistant Secretary with the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and Arts. Mr Rudd had forwarded my letter to the Minister for the Environment, who in turn forwarded it to his Department, where it eventually filtered down through the Department’s Approvals and Wildlife Division to its Wildlife Branch and thence to the Species Listing Section. 

I now realise that the situation is complex and has many ramifications, as demonstrated by the following advice from the Department:

 
1.     In 2007 the Environment Department received a nomination (they cannot identify from whom) requesting that the Minister list as a threatening process under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act: Contemporary fire regimes resulting in loss of vegetation heterogeneity and biodiversity in Northern Australia. The basis of the nomination was concern about widespread late-season fires in the seasonally dry tropics. The nomination did not raise prescribed burning as a threatening process. In fact, according to the Department, it took the position that prescribed burning at the right time of the year was appropriate as a measure to minimise the problem of wide-spread late-season fires.
 
2.    The nomination was referred to the Minister’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee (TSSC), whose job is to review these proposals and make recommendations to the Minister. However, the Committee decided off its own bat that this nomination was relevant to the whole of Australia. So they then broadened the nomination, thus setting themselves the task of reviewing the impacts of contemporary fire regimes (obviously including prescribed burning) on vegetation heterogeneity and biodiversity for all ecosystems across the whole of Australia.

 
3.     The TSS Committee  has advised the Department that they propose to undertake a “transparent, rigorous, science-based assessment with full consultation with stakeholders and the public”. There will be a consultation period and public input will be sought. The Committee will identify independent scientists and consult with them. The final nomination will be released for public review and comments on the draft paper will be sought. The whole process is expected to take about a year. No start time and no budget were mentioned in the Department’s letter.
 
4.    The TSSC has been given a deadline to provide its recommendation to the Minister by 30 September 2010. Minister Garrett will make the final decision, perhaps in early 2011

The Department’s letter concluded by referring me to Mr Peacock, Director of the Species Listing Section who would answer any further questions. 

In the light of this letter, I have looked up the TSSC. It’s members are listed on the Department’s website. The Chairman is a Professor at the University of Qld and the other members are well-qualified academics and scientists. There is a marine biologist, a freshwater biologist, a river ecologist, a fisheries expert, a plant ecologist, a botanist, and an authority on fauna.

As far as I could see, there is no mention of bushfire management, fire science or fire ecology research in the resume of any of the members of the Committee. I assume that they will hire consultants to assist them as special advisers, as is normal practice with Committees like this.

I have also looked up a couple of the TSSC’s previous recommendations and it seems clear from this sample that they are wedded to the Precautionary Principle. This suggests a bias against action in favour of research, perhaps reflecting the weight of academics and scientists on the panel, as opposed to land managers with responsibility for fire outcomes.

The Department also advised in the same letter that even if this process results in contemporary fire regimes (which include prescribed burning in forests) being listed as a threatening process under the Act, “it would not result in the Australian government enforcing additional regulations on prescribed burning practices.”  If something is listed as a threat the Minister “might decide to have a threat abatement plan” prepared, that “might consist of guidelines”  regarding fire management practices.

I agree fully with the initial nomination. There is a serious problem with wide-scale late-season bushfires in northern tropical savannahs and woodlands. However, this has been known for at least 30 years or more, as has the solution, which is early-season prescribed burning to create a mosaic of fuel-reduced areas; these prevent late-season fires from burning too intensely (as the Aborigines knew maybe 30,000 yrs ago). We do not need a federal agency to research this any further. What is needed is for the governments of WA, NT and Qld to develop the appropriate land management plans for these areas, and to allocate the resources to get the plans implemented. Both the WA and NT governments, to my certain knowledge, are already active in this work, and there are a number of Aboriginal communities which are privately funded to carry out early-season burning.

It is interesting to note, and maybe the Committee will note it, that probably the most progressive and intelligent fire management practices in northern Australia at the moment are actually being carried out by corporate conservationists. I have reviewed the fire management policies and practices of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy for their large conservation estates in the Kimberley and north Qld, and I find that they are implementing exactly the sort of bushfire management that will optimise biodiversity and minimise carbon emissions, while also ensuring sensible fuels management. This is an instance of private land management setting first class standards, based on indigenous knowledge and excellent research from scientists, including Jeremy Russell-Smith and David Bowman.

The task which the TSSC has set itself cannot be accomplished in anything but a superficial way. How many contemporary fire regimes are there? Two hundred? A thousand? How many ecosystems across the whole of the country are being impacted by fire regimes? How is vegetation heterogeneity and biodiversity determined for each different ecotype?

It will be possible for the Committee to spell out some principles, but these are already well known to practicing fire ecologists. 

I assume that the TSS Committee is competent and is honourably driven by a desire to protect Australian ecosystems from threats. But I question whether they can tackle this project in isolation from other considerations. For example for most settled areas, it is not possible to separate the threat of fire to flora, fauna and ecological communities from the threat to human lives, communities and social and economic assets. Humans are also a threatened species in some bushfire situations. I also question whether the TSS Committee has the expertise in bushfire science to enable them to make an informed assessment of all the many elements that will need to be taken into account in each different situation.

The inevitable appointment of consultants to assist the Committee presents serious dangers. The Committee will be tempted to select academics, who are always available for this sort of work, are inexpensive compared to professional consultants (the academics are already being paid by their institution) and are keen to influence decision-making about the environment. Unfortunately bushfire scientists are very thin on the ground in Australian academic circles, and their ranks include several who are already saluting the anti-prescribed burning and pro-wildfire flag. It is a sad commentary on the state of intellectual leadership in bushfire science at the moment that I can think of only one Australian academic who would not be considered (by people involved in bushfire management) as a complete disaster if selected by the TSSC as their scientific adviser.

The Federal government does not need to get involved in this issue. There are already existing agencies in each State who have this role. For example in WA we have the EPA, the Conservation Commission, the Department of Environment and Conservation, and a Threatened Species and Communities Unit. The specific job of the Unit is to identify, review and deal with threats to species and ecological communities. In a former life I chaired this body, and I know that they work professionally, taking into account the latest information from competent and experienced scientists and land managers.

The Environment Department’s assurance that no new regulation will arise, even if a listing is made ….. but the Minister “might decide to abate” a threat….. strikes me as threatening in itself. If the Committee was persuaded by, say, the views of the Wilderness Society that prescribed burning in the jarrah forest must be listed as a threatening process, and if Minister Garratt then decided that this threat must be abated …. how would he succeed without imposing some form of Federal regulation on fire management operations by the responsible WA agency? A State-Federal stand-off on the issue would be inevitable, and would provide environmentalists with a heaven- sent opportunity to ridicule the State’s land managers, and to take legal action against them.

The TSSC’s review and report will overlap the Royal Commission into the Bushfires in Victoria, who will be covering many of the same issues. This makes for some interesting possibilities. For example, the Royal Commission could decide that in order to mitigate future bushfire disasters in Victoria, there needs to be a larger annual program of fuel reduction burning under mild conditions. Simultaneously the Threatened Species Scientific Committee, having conducted its own independent assessment, could decide that prescribed burning is a threat to Victoria’s forest ecosystems. Where will this take us?

I consider this project and its lengthy and costly processes to be a waste of time and money. The project is too large and complex. No Committee, and especially one proposing to involve the public in its deliberations can possibly achieve an outcome within the proposed time frame that will have any scientific credibility. Moreover, I oppose the Federal government entering an arena in which there are already existing State and Territory agencies set up to do the job. I would prefer to see Federal money going to independent audits of State agency performance – have they set, and are they meeting appropriate standards, targets and objectives – and then publicly reporting the results. This would overcome the problem that most Australian park and forest management agencies are not subjected to any independent and professional performance audits against performance standards.
 
My concerns, of course, count for nothing. People in the fire management community already know that they will have to take this new review seriously. It has taken on a life of its own, expanding from a small and appropriate study of fire impacts on northern savannahs to a continent-wide review of everything to do with fire, ranging from fire exclusion to high intensity wildfires and every combination and permutation in between. This means that we will need to prepare submissions, attend hearings, comment on draft papers, meet with consultants, defend our positions against 19th century northern hemisphere ecological concepts, and computer models put up as a substitute for field research. In other words, hours, days, probably weeks of work, and because most of us are volunteers, it is work for nothing. We have to do this because we know that if we don’t, and our voice is not heard, the TSSC will be swamped by fire mythology, by un-researched ‘science’ and by laughable but plausible-sounding assertions from the anti-prescribed burning brigade.
 
I know in saying all this I will be pounced upon by the usual voices of green outrage, and be accused of trying to undermine the most important scientific review since European settlement.  And perhaps I am being too pessimistic. I have participated in dozens of bushfire reviews over the years, and invariably they come out in favour of prescribed burning (with the usual qualifications and provisos, with which I invariably agree).  Maybe there is a chance that this committee, coming to bushfire management and fire science with fresh eyes, might see through the nonsense which will come at them from retrogressive institutions like the Fenner School of Environmental Studies at ANU. Perhaps they will visit the fire areas in Victoria and see for themselves the vegetation homogenizing and destruction of biodiversity associated with large high intensity bushfires. They might even compare this with the diverse and heterogeneous outcomes from patchy frequent mild fire. We might even be able to demonstrate to the Committee that there is another way of looking at the Precautionary Principle, one which applies specifically to bushfires and their impacts on lives, ecosystems and the environment.

If not, we just have to keep on doing what we are doing already, and never give up: trying to teach politicians and senior bureaucrats the two fundamental truths about fire management in Australia: (i) bushfires are inevitable; but (ii) we can chose between controlled fires burning under mild conditions, or massive wildfires that take all before them.

*********************************

Roger Underwood is Chairman of The Bushfire Front Inc, an organisation devoted to improving the standards of bushfire management in Australia.

I am quoting from a paper given by Roger Underwood to the Stretton Group in Melbourne recently.

Australian Bushfire Management: a case study in wisdom versus folly
by Roger Underwood

One man’s wisdom is another’s folly, Ralph Waldo Emerson
MANY years ago, still a young man, I watched for the first time the grainy, flickering black and white film of the British infantry making their attack on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. The stark and terrible footage shows the disciplined soldiers climbing from their trenches and, in line abreast, walking slowly across no-man’s land towards the enemy lines. They scarcely travel a few paces before the German machine gunners open up. They are mown down in their thousands. They are chaff before a wind of fire.

I can still remember being struck nerveless by these images, and later my anger when I realised what that calamitous carnage represented.  It spoke of the deep incompetence of the Generals who devised a strategy of doom and then insisted upon its implementation. It spoke of front-line men led by people without front-line experience. It spoke of battle planners unable to think through the consequences of their plans, and who devalued human lives. It spoke of a devastating failure of the human imagination.

Worst of all, the strategies of the World War 1 Generals demonstrated that they had not studied, or that they had forgotten, the lessons of history. In the final year of the American Civil war, 50 years earlier, the Union army had been equipped for the first time with Springfield repeating rifles, replacing the single shot muskets they had previously used and still were being used by the Confederate army.  The impact on Confederate soldiers attacking defenders armed with repeating rifles was identical to that later inflicted by machine guns on the Western Front. But it was a lesson unlearnt, of collective wisdom unregarded.

None of you will have any difficulty in seeing where this analogy is taking me.

The catastrophic bushfires in Victoria this year, and the other great fires of recent years in Victoria, New South Wales, the ACT and South Australia are dramatic expressions not just of killing forces unleashed, but of human folly. No less than the foolish strategies of the World War 1 Generals, these bushfires and their outcomes speak of incompetent leadership and of failed imaginations. Most unforgivable of all, they demonstrate the inability of people in powerful and influential positions to profit from the lessons of history and to heed the wisdom of experience.

But just a minute, I can hear some of you thinking. Is this fellow going too far here? What about the malignant influence of global warming on bushfire conditions, making things impossible for firefighters? What about the unprecedented weather conditions on the day, making the fires of February 2009 “unstoppable”. What about the years of drought making the bush super-ready to burn?  Does he not realise that conditions beyond human understanding have now arisen in Victoria, making killer bushfires inevitable? And what about the promises of technology, the super-aerial tankers and so forth, that will give the initiative to our firefighters for once and for all?

I have thought long and hard about all these issues. I am well aware of the drought, of the terrible conditions on the days of the fires, and of the view from some quarters that all of this is a result of global warming. I accept that drought and bad fire weather increase the risk of serious bushfires. What I do not accept is that “unstoppable” bushfires are the inevitable consequence.  And while I will always welcome improved firefighting technology, I know from experience and from an understanding of the simple physics of bushfire behaviour, that technology can never be a substitute for good land management. The serious bushfire is like a disease that is incubated over many years; good land management is the preventative medicine that ensures the disease does not become a killer epidemic.

To me, the epidemic of recent killer bushfires in Victoria are not an indicator of what is inevitable in the future. To me, they are an indicator of the inevitable consequences of what has happened in the past. To me, these fires toll like bells: they toll for failed leadership, failed governance and failed land management.

The issues of leadership and of good governance are central to my position. What these terrible fires point to is that the leaders of our society, Victoria’s politicians and senior bureaucrats, have palpably failed to do the most fundamental thing expected of them: to safeguard Victorian lives and the Victorian environment in the face of an obvious threat. They have failed to discharge their duty of care. Just as we now look back with incredulity at the amateurish strategies of the Generals in The Great War of 1914-1918, so will future Australians look back on the work of those responsible for land and bushfire management in this country (our bushfire Generals) in the years leading up to The Great Fires of 2003-2009. 

The toll of the 2009 Victorian fires is shocking. Over 200 lives  – lost. Thousands of homes  – destroyed. Millions of dollars worth of social and economic infrastructure  – reduced to ashes. The work of generations, the farmlands, stock, fences, woolsheds, yards and pastures  – dead and gone. Native animals and birds  – killed in their millions. Beautiful forests – cooked, in some cases stone dead. Catchments – eroding. The costs – multi-millions of dollars. Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – the equivalent of a year’s supply for the whole of Australia. Psychological damage to children and families – uncountable.

Our bushfire Generals……. those Premiers, Ministers and senior bureaucrats in whom the people of Victoria put their trust….. can have no excuses.

They cannot say they didn’t know we have serious bushfires in Australia. This is no soft, green island where no bushfire ever burns. Australians have not arrived only recently in this hot, dry sclerophyllous land. Even if we overlook for a moment the fire management experience of Aboriginal people, accumulated over 40,000 years or so, non-Aboriginal Australians have been here for over 200 years, with 200 fire seasons, thousands of hot, dry and windy days, dozens of prolonged  droughts, tens of thousands of thunderstorms, millions of lightning strikes, and hundreds of  thousands of bushfires. This is no new or unique phenomenon. [Note 1]

They cannot say the impacts of intense bushfires on human communities were unimaginable.  We have known for 200 years that European settlement represented the insertion of a fire-vulnerable society into a fire-prone environment.  We have seen the consequences of mixing hot fires and settlements on many….. too many….. occasions, to doubt the result. [2]

They cannot say that Australians are powerless in the face of the bushfire threat, that bushfires are “unstoppable”. From the earliest days of settlement, through to the evolution of the fire management systems developed by experienced land and forest managers in the 1950s and 1960s, we have known what is needed to minimise bushfire intensity and bushfire damage [3], even under extreme conditions. From at least the 1960s we have known how to build and maintain houses in fire-prone environments so as to optimise their survival.

They cannot say that the relationships between fire and the Australian bush are still unknown.  There have been 200 years of observation and records and over 50 years of scientific research on this very subject. This experience and this research has confirmed that fire is not an alien visitor, but a natural part of Australian bushland ecosystems. The right sort of fire is an agent for rejuvenation, regeneration, recycling and bushland health, a stimulus for biodiversity.  Fire is to the Australian bush as are the waves and tides to Australian seaweeds and marine life.  It is the absence of fire, especially of mild fire, that is the real threat to the Australian bush, because the inevitable result is a landscape-level holocaust, from which it might take a century or more for recovery.

And they cannot say that they were not warned. Warnings have emerged from the aftermath of every damaging bushfire for the last 70 years or more…… from inquiries, commissions and reports, from independent auditors and from land managers, bushfire scientists, foresters, farmers and firefighters. In recent years the warnings have come thick and fast. Magnificent books have been written on the subject [4]; there have been dozens of scientific papers and popular articles written by our very own world-respected bushfire experts like Phil Cheney. There have been detailed submissions by professional groups such as Forest Fire Victoria, the Bushfire Front and the Institute of Foresters of Australia. As recently as 2008 the Victorian Parliament undertook its own review and produced one of the best reports I have ever seen. Its key recommendations were simply…… “noted” in passing.

Can anyone say that no clear lessons have emerged from the bushfire calamities of the past? Can anyone say they are unaware of the previous fires that have burned Australian farms, settlements and suburbs, incinerated our national parks, nature reserves, rangelands and forests, or scorched out northern savannahs? Did no-one notice all those bushfires over the years that cut power supplies, burned out bridges and roads, destroyed schools, churches and hospitals, interrupted or fouled water supplies, destroyed observatories and threatened species, plantations, orchards and vineyards?

No, there is no shortage of lessons. They have even flowed in, for those who should have listened and learned, from Greece, from Portugal, and from the western United States and Canada during the last few years.

Over and over again, the same words have rung out, the same message has been sent:

1. In our climatic zone with hot dry summers and periodic drought, and with our flammable vegetation and frequent lightning strikes, bushfires are inevitable.
2. If fuels are allowed to accumulate, bushfires in eucalypt forests rapidly attain an intensity that exceeds the human capacity to extinguish them, notwithstanding the most modern and massive suppression forces.
3. Communities and economic assets in the path of high intensity fires will suffer horrible damage.
4. But! Potential damage can be minimised by application of a fire management system that incorporates responsible planning, and high standards of preparedness and damage mitigation, especially fuel reduction.
5. And! We have a choice: fires are inevitable, but we can chose to have mild controlled fires, or ungovernable infernos.

No, our politicians and bushfire generals cannot say they have not been warned. They cannot say there were no lessons to learn. They cannot say the message had not been sent.

They can only say that it was not received, or that it was received but ignored. Neither excuse is acceptable.

So what are the explanations? Why were sound messages not received, or received but not acted upon? Why,  after 200 years of experience and 50 years of world-leading research, after working examples of how to set up an effective system of bushfire management have been established…… how was it possible that our political and bureaucratic leaders opted to adopt a bushfire system that does not work, that fails to protect Victorians from death, disaster and environmental calamity?

There are two answers.

1. The first is political. Put simply, in the last 25 years and when it comes to bushfire management, Australia governments have failed to govern. The focus of politicians has been on getting elected or staying in power, not in providing intelligent, tough and effective governance. This has led to political parties courting the preference votes of pressure groups and of city-based electors who are in the thrall of pressure group philosophies.

Despite the protestations of environmentalists over the last few weeks, there is no question that the influence of green activists at Federal, State and Local government levels has resulted in a steep decline in the standard of bushfire management in this country. Their influence is exemplified by two things: (i) opposition to prescribed burning for fuel reduction, resulting in unprecedented fuel build-ups in parks, forests and reserves close to population centres; and (ii) rural residential developments, in which developers and residents have been prevented or discouraged by environmentalist-dominated local councils from taking reasonable measures to ensure houses are bushfire-safe; and where people are living in houses in the bush where there is no effective enforcement by councils of building codes or hazard reduction. [5]

The situation where a Government fails to govern is, of course, made worse when communities and individuals fail to self-govern. People building houses and choosing to live in the bush also have a personal responsibility – to look after themselves and their neighbours. This responsibility, it seems to me, has also been discouraged by modern governments.

2. The second explanation is technical. In recent years many Australian bushfire authorities have been seduced by the siren call of technology. This has lured them into a fatal trap. Their assumption is that any fire can be contained so long as they get it early and then have enough hardware to throw at it.  This approach arose in the United States in the years after World War 2, and is thus known to Australian land managers as “the American Approach”.

The American Approach is fundamentally flawed. Fifty years of its application in the United States and ten years in Australia has demonstrated that no force of firefighters in the world, indeed the fire-fighting resources of the world could they be marshalled into one place, can stop a crown fire in heavy forest which is generating a jet-stream of spotfires downwind, each spot fire also landing in heavy fuels, and starting new crown fires. The best and the bravest men and women, armed with the most munificent, the most magnificent and the most expensive equipment, is totally overwhelmed [6]. 

This is a reality that still appears not to have penetrated the Australian bushfire Generals and our political leaders. Not only have we seen the American Approach increasingly supported in this country, and then watched as it invariably fails when pitted against multiple hot fires in heavy fuels…… despite this!….. it seems to have taken on a life of its own. Every year more money is poured into the purchase of super-expensive equipment, but the outcomes on the ground just get worse. As recently as last week, Australian emergency services experts were launching new and strident calls for more and more expensive technology, completely ignoring the need for preventative measures.

Adoption of the American Approach has been accompanied by an equally disastrous institutional re-arrangement: the progressive transfer of bushfire responsibilities on crown lands from land management agencies to the emergency services.  In this scenario, beloved of politicians and bushfire Generals, the focus of funding is shifted from preparedness and damage mitigation to emergency response. What this means in practice is less emphasis on fuel reduction and more on building up fleets of water-bombers, tankers, and other high tech firefighting gizmos, an enormous paramilitary force (overseen by technocrats in Head Office) whose function is to put out fires after they start… but which is doomed to failure whenever they are faced with multiple fires burning in heavy fuels under hot windy conditions.

These new and deleterious institutional arrangements persist because they are supported by powerful vested interests. The emergency services have a vested interest in maintaining a huge fire suppression machine and in making every fire – even an inconsequential fire – an emergency.  I have watched over recent years as they have created a state of dependence on their firefighting forces, which, when things go bad, they cannot deliver upon. And they have encouraged the belief in the public mind that all fire is bad and has to be suppressed or avoided. 

Politicians also have a vested interest in the American Approach. It is easier and simpler to finance suppression systems than damage mitigation, and they can bask in the glow of measures which are highly visible to the public and the media, and give the impression that they are doing something useful, irrespective of the fact that it will not succeed under bad fire conditions. I ask you….how often have you seen a politician lighting the first match of a prescribed burn, compared with the occasions when you see them breaking the champaigne over a newly purchased helicopter water bomber?

In saying this, I need to make an important point: I am not critical of the firefighters on the ground, professional and volunteer. I know these people, and I know them to be brave, resourceful and tough. I admire them unreservedly. But they are increasingly being asked by their own leadership to do the impossible.

But what of the assertions from groups such as the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Wilderness Society that because of global warming, big unstoppable bushfires are here to stay, and we might just as well get used to them. I totally reject this line of argument. It is an insult to human intelligence and to the human spirit. If the computer projections are correct and it does become hotter and dryer, this means we have to make even greater efforts at fire prevention, further improve our state of preparedness and take even more serious measures to minimise potential bushfire damage. The idea that there is nothing we can do in the face of global warming but retreat into the CFA shed and wait for the next fire to come at us over the horizon is defeatist and in the end, inhumane. And suggestions that everything will be OK if only Australians reduce their carbon dioxide emissions is surely an example of kindergarten-level thinking.

The need for mitigation of bushfire damage through fuel reduction by prescribed burning is absolutely central to effective bushfire management in dryland Australia [7]. I support the concept unequivocally, although I set some clear parameters: burning must be based on sound research into fuel characteristics, fire behaviour and fire effects; burns must be conducted professionally by trained personnel using the best-available burning guides; and every burn must be part of an overarching strategic approach, the carefully designed and constantly updated jigsaw known as the Strategic Burning Plan.

This is how it is done in Western Australia and could be done in Victoria.  But even in WA the system slipped in recent years, as foresters battled to keep a fuels management program going in the face of cunning opposition from environmentalists and compliant politicians. WA has also seen an almost complete abandonment of effective bushfire management on private land over the last decade, with Local Government opting out and no-one else filling the vacuum.  This is a situation people like me are trying to address as we speak. Would it not be better, we say to the WA government, to sort things out in advance, rather than after a disaster?

Nevertheless, 50 years of hard experience in Western Australia and world-class research [8] has demonstrated beyond argument that  while fuel reduction by prescribed burning does not prevent bushfires, it ensures fires do less damage, and it makes them easier and safer to extinguish. In gambler’s terms, it shortens the odds in favour of the firefighter. In human terms, it means people living in bushland areas where fuels have been reduced, are less likely to be burnt to death than are people living amongst heavy fuels.

Victoria, New South Wales and to a lesser extent South Australia are years behind Western Australia when it comes to the critical business of fuels and fire management. There is a no need for new research to demonstrate the value of prescribed burning, as some academics are suggesting [9]. The need is to apply existing knowledge in a vastly expanded prescribed burning program on the lands that burn. The need is to upgrade the fire skills of field staff in parks and forests so that they can handle burns confidently and efficiently. The need is to develop comprehensive planning and control systems to ensure burning is professionally carried out, and the results are properly monitored and recorded. Above and beyond all this is the need for governments to recognise these needs, to act on them and to support their staff in the field.

And here’s the rub. Based on history, you could be excused for asking will anything change, or will we see just another revolution of the bushfire cycle? [10]

My fear is that governments, however much they make the right noises, will in the end want to stay in office, and unless things change, this will mean pandering to those who (despite their current protestations) have consistently opposed responsible bushfire management.

My fear is that the forces who benefit from the status quo will already be marshalling their resources in its defence. These will include the bushfire Generals who will not want to lose their power and influence, or to see funding going to land management (which they do not control) instead of new helicopters, water bombers and tankers (which they do).

I fear that  all-knowing academics from the Fenner School of Environmental Studies at ANU, and members of the Canberra and Melbourne intelligentsia will emerge from their leafy campuses to tell us that actually there is no problem at all…. surely, everyone knows that killer bushfires are simply Mother Nature at work, or the planet’s revenge for our despicable environmentally-unfriendly behaviour. This line will be pushed over and again, helping to massage the consciences of politicians reluctant to make substantial changes to policies and practices which they think will be electorally unpopular  [11].

Yes, I am fearful. But I am also hopeful (in a pessimistic way!) My intense hope is that this time things might change. Notwithstanding the whining of the effete intelligentsia, and opposition to change from within the green bureaucracy, the powerful environmental groups and the emergency service chiefs, I think that this time it is going to be hard for the Victorian government to find excuses for doing nothing. In turn, I think that it is also going to be hard for State governments in NSW, SA, Tas and WA to ignore the carnage in Victoria and the fact that fingers are being pointed very directly at the politicians and their bushfire Generals.

I also think that the Federal Government might finally decide that it is high time they reviewed their approach, which is basically one of rewarding State governments for failed land management. And I think that a great many Local Governments are going to realise that the planning buck stops with them….. if they knowingly put people into danger through their town planning and environmental policies, and the people are then killed, they cannot escape accountability.

Finally, I think that this time, it will finally dawn on governments and their advisers that in  the Australian bush if you do not manage fire, you cannot manage for anything else.

Think about that for a moment. In  the Australian bush if you do not manage fire, you cannot manage for anything else.

It is all very well to say that the management objective for our parks, forests and reserves is “protection of biodiversity”, as most national parks agencies say these days. The trouble is, this objective cannot be achieved without first having put in place an effective bushfire management system. Where is the biodiversity today in those thousands of hectares of bushland without a green leaf to be seen, those “bare ruined choirs where no bird sings”?

It is the same in areas where the stated management priority is to protect water catchments. But to say this, and then adopt a strategy that allows fuels to build up until the day comes when the catchments are reduced to dead trees and ash – is blatantly self-defeating. And it is the same for every other land management objective, whether this be protection of aesthetics and lovely forest landscapes, protection of recreational areas, protection of commercial values and residential areas or the conservation of soil, remnant bushland on farms or threatened species.

Therefore, the first rule of land management in Australia is this: get your bushfire management right, or be prepared to lose the lot.

I started this paper with a reference to World War 1, and the futility of the strategies adopted by the Generals throughout the first three and half years of the war. It is significant that the breakthrough in 1918, the new strategy, was designed by an Australian, indeed a Victorian, General Sir John Monash. The Monash strategy was based on firstly establishing clear priorities and unambiguous objectives – he knew exactly what he wanted from amongst the options of what could be achieved. It was based on excellent planning, anticipation of difficulties and attention to detail [12]. It was based on the advice of experts, men who had been at Gallipoli and in the trenches in France and Belgium, and who spoke from experience on the ground, not from ideology. Above all, Monash was not prepared to sacrifice human lives needlessly. With all of this behind them, the troops on the ground did the rest. Monash’s new approach provided the blueprint for the end to the slaughter on the Western Front.

What Australian bushfire management is crying out for is a new General Monash, a leader who understands that the current approach has failed and is doomed to continuing failure, that the influential advisers have no front-line experience. An effective new leader will know that if we clarify and properly rank our objectives, listen to the voices of experience and the lessons of history, and act accordingly, the odds favouring success will be massively shortened.

But the great General Monash himself would not succeed without the support of Prime Ministers, Premiers and Ministers, prepared to stand firm behind him when the Wilderness Society, the Canberra intelligentsia and the ABC current affairs people gang up on him. A good response to this lot might be  “Sorry, mates, we are doing what is best for Australia and Australians, based on good science, experience and the word from the people who have most to lose”. Politically incorrect, of course, but it is the approach adopted when it comes to defence of the country against external enemies and national security, and which most Australians accept in that context.

Nor will a new general succeed without legislative and policy backing to enable land management agencies to win back the ground they have lost to the emergency services. Our parks and forests agencies must be empowered and resourced to manage fuels, indeed they must be required to do so, if necessary by legislation. Australia must abandon the American Approach, replacing it with an Australian Approach, a system in which equal weight is given to prevention and suppression, rather than trying, helplessly, to pile all our eggs in the suppression basket.

For any of this to happen our political leaders need to hear from the people whose lives and assets have been sacrificed or recklessly put at risk by the failed policies of the past.  It is essential that the people who have suffered demand systemic change, not just window dressing, more helicopters and overseas firefighters. Unless they speak up, there is no chance they will be heard. Politicians will take the easy way out. [13]

I think we can say that the environmentalist approach to bushfire management, including reliance on aerial firefighting, has been given a very fair go. It has had a good test.  Regrettably, and predictably, the results reveal that it has been a failure [14]. The excuses put forward, especially that fires are unstoppable because of global warming, are simply that: excuses. They do not allow for the capacity of intelligent humans to foresee a threat and to forestall it.

To conclude. The choices before us are straight-forward: do Australians, and especially Victorians, want our bushfire and land management planning done by professionals with front-line experience, or by campus intellectuals and ideologists? Is it smarter to manage bushfire fuels by burning them at times of our own choosing when conditions are mild, or to stand back, do nothing and risk being engulfed by fire at the worst possible time? If fires are inevitable, which is preferable: a controlled or a feral fire? And do we see humans as part of the ecosystem and plan accordingly, or do we see them as interlopers, as illegal immigrants in the Australian bush?

Do we opt for Wisdom or for Folly?
 
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Notes

Roger Underwood is a forester with fifty years experience in bushfire management and bushfire science. He has worked as a firefighter, a district and regional manager, a research manager and senior government administrator. He is Chairman of The Bushfire Front, an independent professional group promoting best practice in bushfire management.

1. The question of Aboriginal burning is still debated. According to the accounts of early explorers and settlers and to present-day Aborigines, pre-European burning was widespread and frequent. This information is rejected by environmentalists as “hear-say”. Western Australian ecologist David Ward has found a unique way to unlock the history of pre-European burning, through his study of fire scars on grass trees. Ward’s work in the jarrah forests of Western Australia, indicate that fire occurred there at intervals of 2-4 years, and combined with his understanding of fuel dynamics and fire behaviour, he concludes that these fires would have been of mild intensity and patchy. Academics from Melbourne University, without ever having worked in the jarrah forest, have dismissed Ward’s findings, preferring the print-outs from a theoretical computer model.

2. Not everyone agrees about the environmental impact of large intense wildfires. Dr Ross Bradstock who lectures to undergraduates at the Australian National University, has written in an article in the Melbourne Age newspaper that that there was no scientific evidence for the claims that millions of birds and mammals died, or that forest diversity was reduced in the Victorian Alpine fires in 2003.

3. Laura Meredith, writing of her home in Tasmania in 1840, records a time when her husband was away and bushfires were threatening her home. She discovered with relief that her husband had taken the wise precaution of burning the ferns over the whole of a wide span of the forest which surrounds us and thus the home was rendered safe.

4. The best book written on fire in Australia is Stephen Pyne’s Burning Bush (first published in 1991 and updated following the 2003/4 fires) but there are also numerous books on fire science and history, including the excellent Fire and Hearth by the anthropologist Sylvia Hallam. Hallam quotes Lort Stokes, a fellow traveller with Charles Darwin on the Beagle who watched as Aboriginal people near Albany carried out their routine burning of the bush, replacing (in Stokes’ words) fires of “ungovernable fury” with those of “complete docility”.

5. In the very week leading up to  Victoria’s Black Saturday, Western Australian bushfire managers found themselves dealing with a Greens Member of Parliament who was threatening to organise a protesters’ camp in the bush to prevent a prescribed burn. The burn was planned to protect two local townships plus some very lovely forest from wildfire.

6. As Shakespeare pointed out: A little fire is quickly trodden out, but being suffered, rivers will not quench.  Many of those who oppose prescribed burning believe that if we simply had enough firefighters, permanently waiting in the bush for fires to start, and able to tread on them at the instant of ignition, no large fires would ever occur. Firefighters regard this as impractical. In eucalypt forests carrying heavy dry fuels, a fire can become too fierce to allow direct attack by firefighters within minutes of ignition, indicating that the “treading out” approach would require several million firefighters on standby throughout Australian forests for several months of every year.

7. “Dryland Australia” is the bulk of the continent, outside the tropical rainforests of the north, some of the wet temperate rainforests of southern Tasmania, and coastal mangroves. It is the Australia that burns.

8. The Project Vesta research, a 10-year study completed in Australia in 2007, involved a collaboration of CSIRO, government agencies and the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre. It represents the most comprehensive and technically defensible bushfire research program ever carried out anywhere in the world. The results unequivocally support the value of prescribed burning as a means of reducing bushfire intensity, and puts forward new approaches to fuel measurement and characterisation.

9. “More research is needed” is the standard response of academics and scientists to any issue. This is because they depend on research grants to pay their salaries and expenses. In Australia the fundamental questions about fire behaviour and fuels management have already been answered, going back to the work by Alan MacArthur, Phil Cheney, George Peet and Rick Sneeuwjagt in the 1960s and 1970s, and on building design by the CSIRO going back to the Tasmanian fires of 1967 and the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983. The pressing requirements today are for refining fire behaviour tables and developing prescribed burning guides for various forest types, in other words for applied or operational research which builds on current knowledge.  This sort of work can only be carried out by bushfire experienced researchers in the field, not by theoretical analysts and computer experts in academia.

10. The Bushfire Cycle runs thus: first there is a disastrous bushfire. This is followed by inquiries, commissions and reviews and the system is greatly upgraded. Over subsequent years, the new system is so effective that there are no serious bushfires. Apathy and complacency set in, weirdo pressure groups arise, governments lose interest and funds and staff are reduced. The system degrades. Then there is another bushfire disaster and the wheel revolves once more.

11. According to the doyen of Canberra intellectuals Professor Clive Hamilton, speaking on ABC’s Radio National recently; “the most interesting thing about the recent Victorian bushfires has been the attacks on greenies.” Apparently he did not find the loss of over 200 lives as interesting as the ruffling of the feathers of a few environmental activists.

12. Les Carlyon in his magnificent book The Great War, notes that Monash’s final planning conference before the attack on Hamel in 1918  had an agenda of 133 items. Elsewhere it is recorded that the then-Colonel Monash, commanding Australian troops at Gallipoli in 1915, set up his command HQ thirty metres from the Turkish front trenches.

13.  The fundamental issue, and the basis of the whole difficulty facing professional bushfire managers, is very well summed up by Jim Hacker, fictional Minister for Administrative Services in the television series ‘Yes Minister’: “There are times in a politician’s life when he is obliged to take the wrong decision. Wrong economically, wrong industrially, wrong by any standards – except one. It is a curious fact that something which is wrong from every other point of view can be right politically. And something which is right politically does not simply mean that it is the way to get the votes – which it is – but also if a policy gets the votes then it can be argued that that policy is what the people want. And, in a democracy, how can a thing be wrong if it is what the people will vote for?” The ultimate test for the Victorian government in the wake of the recent fires is whether or not it caves in to green demands on bushfire issues in order to win preference votes and stay in power at the next election.  The ‘Yes Minister’ scenario, and past performances, suggests that they will fail this test, and will cave in, unless there is a dramatic outburst of political courage and responsible government.

14. It was notable that some of the worst of the recent fire damage in Victoria occurred in the dark, at night or under gale force winds when aerial waterbombers were grounded. This is consistent with my own experience. In 1978 I was the Officer in Charge in the karri forest in Western Australia during the Cyclone Alby bushfire crisis. The first thing we had to do as the cyclonic winds approached, was to ground all our aircraft and tie them down.

I was therefore interested to see that the Wilderness Society News 173 (Winter 2008) contains a Six Point Action Plan that the Society says will “reduce bushfire risks and help to protect people, property, wildlife and their habitat”. They have done this because they assert that a “massive increase in hazard reduction burning and firebreaks is destroying nature, pushing wildlife closer to extinction and in many cases increasing the fire risk to people and properties by making areas more fire prone”.

The Society also says that with the onset of climate change “mega-bushfires that burn massive areas” are expected to become more frequent. They have therefore come up with the following Action Plan:
1. Improve aerial fire detection.
2. Ramp-up high-tech suppression forces, including more Elvis helitaks;
3. Do more research into fire behaviour and the impacts of fire on wildlife;
4. Around towns and urban areas, carry out fuel reduction burning and have fire breaks;
5. Give priority to wildlife and their habitat in remote areas and national parks;
6. Make forests resistant to megafires by protecting them from woodchipping and logging.

I disagree that there has been “massive increases in burning” which are “pushing wildlife to the brink of extinction”.  On the contrary, statistics from various agencies show that the amount of burning in forests and woodlands in Western Australia, Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales has declined since the 1980s. I am not aware of a single species of wildlife in Australia which is at the brink of extinction due to prescribed burning. In my view the real threat to wildlife is the large high-intensity summer bushfire. These are generally a consequence of insufficient prescribed burning.

I find the Wilderness Society’s Action Plan deficient. It is impractical, greenhouse unfriendly and costly. Most importantly, it will not reduce the number of large high intensity forest fires in Australian forests. It is the relatively small number of large, high intensity fires that do most of the environmental, economic and social damage caused by bushfires, and therefore must be the primary target of a fire management system. The very much larger number of small low-intensity bushfires are easily suppressed and do little harm.

A surprising aspect of the Society’s Action Plan is that it does not appear to have had any input from people with knowledge of bushfire science or with actual forest fire management experience.  Unfortunately this does not mean it can be ignored, as the Wilderness Society has a very high media and political profile.

Taking each of their proposed action points in turn:

1. Aerial detection is a first-rate resource. A comprehensive system of aerial detection has been in place in all southern Australian states since the early 1970s, supported (under rising fire danger conditions) by lookout towers. However, aerial detection has limits. The greatest problem is that the system can fail completely when it is most needed – under hot unstable atmospheric conditions and when there are very high winds. [I was the Officer in Charge in the karri forest during the Cyclone Alby bushfire emergency, and on the day of the fires all our aircraft had to be grounded and tied down.]

Furthermore, whilst rapid and accurate fire detection is a routine aspect of all existing fire management systems in Australia (and has been since about World War 1), it is of little use if you cannot get firefighters to the fire in time to do useful work. In heavy fuels in the jarrah forest, for example, even under moderate summer conditions a fire can become too intense to be directly suppressed by firefighters within about 15 minutes of ignition. When multiple ignitions occur, as happens during electrical storms, the risk of losing fires increases with every new ignition. This is because access, and resources for fire suppression, are the limiting factors, not detection capability.

2. The dream of hi-tech aerial water bombers dominating forest fires is just that: a dream. It has never succeeded in Australia, and not even in the USA where the entire might of an enormous fleet of water bombers fails repeatedly to handle hot fires burning in heavy fuels. Elvis helitaks look impressive and they are beloved of the war correspondents who cover “bushfire events”. But they cost a fortune, burn massive amounts of fossil fuel, use gigalitres of precious water and are ineffective in stopping the run of a crown fire which is throwing spotfires. Water bombers do good work protecting houses from grass fires at the urban interface, and in some cases can help to “hold” a small forest fire burning under mild conditions until ground forces arrive. But against a big hot forest fire they are next to useless. On simple environmental and economic grounds alone their expanded use cannot be supported, but this is especially so when a more carbon-friendly solution is available which is cheaper and more effective. 

Few people appreciate the heat energy released by a large bushfire burning in heavy fuels. Calculations show that the fire that engulfed Canberra in January 2003 had an energy release equivalent to a Hiroshima-type nuclear bomb being exploded every 30 minutes. The idea that such fires can be extinguished by helicopters dropping water is quite unrealistic.

3. I can only agree with the Society that more research is needed into fire behaviour and fire impacts, especially the impacts of large high-intensity fires on fauna, water catchments and soils. This is not to say that a great deal of research has not been done already, and I would draw attention specifically to the Project Vesta studies. This ten-year multi-disciplinary study, involving CSIRO, the Bushfire CRC and scientists from a number of research and management institutions, is probably the most comprehensive fire behaviour/impacts research ever done. The conclusions were unambiguous, and do not support the recommendations of the Wilderness Society.

Curiously, the deleterious impacts of large high intensity fires on water catchments do not rate any mention in the Society’s Action Plan. In the short term, a high intensity fire has an enormous environmental cost. It bares and erodes the soil, and sends sediments into streams, wetlands and reservoirs. In the longer term, it destroys mature forest and replaces it with regrowth, reducing catchment yield. If indeed it turns out that our climate is drying, Australia needs to protect its forested catchments from damage by wildfire, not deliberately expose them, and protection cannot be achieved by locking them away and hoping a big unstoppable fire will never come.

4. It is revealing that the Society recommends that fuel reduction burning should be done around towns and urban areas. This suggests that they understand its value in minimising fire risk, rather than making the burned areas “more fire prone”, as claimed elsewhere in their article. But it is surely illogical to suggest that prescribed burning is acceptable as a means of reducing fire risk in forests around towns but not in the wider forests.

5. I agree that insufficient priority is given to wildlife conservation in national parks and remote areas – but not for the same reasons as the Wilderness Society. The current management of many forested national parks in Australia has led to a situation in which fuels have accumulated in areas from which fire has been excluded for many years, often decades. This has been accompanied by the closure of roads and fire trails, and downgrading of trained firefighters in favour of water bombers. The result is that sooner or later an uncontrollable landscape-level fire occurs. These decimate the wildlife, bake and erode soils and kill stone-dead the old growth forests over thousands of hectares. The alternative is more frequent planned burning under mild conditions. This leads to a mosaic of burnt and unburnt areas, leaves the overstorey and the soil intact, and ensures a diversity of habitat for wildlife and opportunities for rapid regeneration and recolonisation. In a holistic fire management system this approach is supported by an adequate system of roads and fire trails, maintained so as to allow safe access by firefighters, plus the maintenance of a corps of well-trained professionally-led firefighters in and around the forest.

6. I have never seen any evidence that old growth forest is less likely to burn than the regrowth forests arising in the wake of logging or wildfire. Fire risk is determined by climatic and weather conditions, fuel type, fuel weight and dryness, aspect and topography. These factors are independent of the age of the trees overhead. The Society’s statement that ‘mega-fires” can be prevented by stopping woodchipping suggests a forest policy based on a political agenda rather than knowledge of fire physics or bushfire experience.

Finally, I note the old chestnut that ‘global warming will cause inevitable megafires’. This is now being said so often by so many pundits that it has achieved the status of biblical truth. What it ignores, however, is the presence in the system of intelligent and determined humans. If the computer models are correct and the weather becomes hotter and drier, it does not inevitably mean that we have to throw up our hands in despair and retreat into a bunker waiting for the next inferno to come roaring over the horizon. Pre-emptive action to minimise fire intensity and fire damage is possible, and we already know how to do it! Indeed in southern Australia, the computer-generated predictions suggest greater opportunities for fuel reduction burning under mild condition, as winters will be drier and springs and autumns warmer. Less fuel will lead to less intense fires, less fire damage and easier and safer fire suppression, to say nothing of healthier, greener forests.

There are many deficiencies in current Australian bushfire policies and practices, as illustrated by the increasing number of large fires experienced in all States in recent years. The answer does not lie in the throwing up of hands as suggested by the climate doomsdayers, or in the sort of measures put forward by the Wilderness Society; indeed these approaches will only make things worse.  It lies in strong leadership, from land managers who are prepared to put bushfire preparedness and damage mitigation in front of the razzle-dazzle of aerial suppression technology. It requires governments to put more resources into research and into monitoring actual bushfire outcomes, including the environmental impacts of large high intensity bushfires, and continuous feedback to management systems from real-world experience out in the forest.

Roger Underwood lives in Perth, Australia. He is a former firefighter, and a district and regional manager with the Forests Department in Western Australia and is currently chairman of the Bushfire Front Inc, an organisation dedicated to best practice in bushfire management in Australia.

The photograph from David Ward, shows a scotching at Scott River, Western Australia and was taken on January 30, 2007.

Given the current hysteria about global warming, and the plethora and complexity of emerging schemes involving carbon-trading, carbon-capping, carbon-off-setting, carbon-emission-minimising and carbon-taxing, I can understand why the government would want a single agency which can keep tabs on all this and drive their political agenda. I am also unsurprised to find that the department’s chief is an economist, and the ranks are studded with economists. This reflects the new focus of the climate change issue: no longer are governments seeking ways to reduce carbon emissions – rather they are seeking to identify the carbon-fighting measures which will have the least possible economic impact.

Nevertheless I am cynical about the creation of a new department whose budget, staffing, political influence and public status is dependent on climate change actually occurring. A Department of Climate Change needs climate change – no climate change will be (for them) a disaster. In other words, the bad-news scenario now has a bureaucratic home, its very own institution, a whole government organisation dedicated to promoting the prophesy of doom to its own advantage.

This phenomenon is not new. I was a junior officer in the Forests Department many years ago, and I recall how the environmentalists accused us of having been “captured” by the timber industry. They also accused the Mines Department of being captured by the mining industry, the Agriculture Department by the agricultural industry and the Fisheries Department by the fishing industry. (Curiously, they never saw any problem with the Department of Environmental Protection being captured by the environmentalist industry).

There is a difference between what the environmentalists call bureaucratic capture, and what I call institutional self-fulfilment. The former involves external influence on an agency by a special interest group to enhance its special interest; the latter is where an agency is working behind the scenes to ensure its own prosperity and survival. A classic historical example of institutional self-fulfilment was the work of the Rabbit Department in Western Australia. The Rabbit Department was created 100 years or so ago to wipe out the rabbit in WA. The agency grew rapidly, attracted a substantial budget, and undertook (on the advice of its senior public servants) a number of massive, expensive and ultimately useless projects. These included two “rabbit-proof” fences thousands of kilometres in length, the construction of which proceeded despite the fact that the rabbit was already west of the surveyed fenceline. I have talked to old farmers and pastoralists who regarded the department as a joke because it was well-known that departmental staff had no intention of eliminating rabbits. To do so would have been to do themselves out of a job. To make matters worse, the WA government (in the way of governments everywhere) was quite happy to come up with the one-off capital cost of building the fences, but not the recurrent costs of maintaining them properly. The fences became a joke amongst rabbits.

Similarly the bushfire issue in Australia is increasingly subject to institutional self-fulfilment. Bushfire responsibilities have been progressively transferred from land management agencies (who are concerned about fire impacts) to Emergency Services (who fight fires). Staff in Emergency Service agencies are trained and equipped for dealing with bushfire emergencies, not for management of the land where bushfires potentially occur. Don’t get me wrong – the firefighters do a great job, and are an essential community service. The trouble is, fire-fighting is their business, their raison d’être. Furthermore, it is well rewarded in terms of favourable media attention, a grateful public, political support and funds. But if there were no bushfires or an insignificant bushfire threat, the fire-fighting services would wither away. Thus their whole focus is on response after a fire starts, with investment in helitaks, water bombers, fire tankers, high tech equipment, super-gizmo headquarters, and lots of staff. What misses out is the essential but unglamorous work of damage mitigation, fire prevention, fuel reduction, fire trail maintenance, community education, law enforcement and so on, i.e., the year-in and year-out recurrent work of minimising the number and impacts of fires, and making them easier and safer to suppress. Far from being rewarded, fuel reduction burning is hated by environmentalists, who depict land management staff who carry out a burning program as irresponsible vandals, effectively undermining their political support. The way the current system is constructed, all the kudos go to the firefighters and none to the fire pre-emptors – a situation very well understood by Emergency Services chiefs.

It seems to me entirely predictable that the processes applying to rabbits and bushfires will also apply to the new Department of Climate Change. If it is to survive and prosper it will need rapidly to become a Department for climate change. I would be very surprised if DCC staff did not already realise that the security of their agency and their opportunities for recognition and promotion will be closely linked to the degree to which the media, community and politicians think that climate change is (i) imminent; (ii) disastrous; (iii) inevitable; and (iv) requiring the sort of complex economic and bureaucratic skills found only among the officers of the Commonwealth Public Service.

I can think of three ways all this might pan out. First, it might become apparent to everyone that climate change is a natural thing governed largely by non-anthropomorphic factors. Second, climate change caused by carbon dioxide emissions might be confirmed, but it will become apparent that there is little Australians can do that will make a significant world-scale difference, even with massive economic self-abuse. Third, the penny might drop that we have real environmental/social problems which demand urgent national attention, i.e., diminishing and more costly oil, management of water resources, declining air quality in cities and killer bushfires. Now there are four issues which each deserve their own Federal department with four divisions, thirteen branches and offices packed with beavering staff!

Roger Underwood is a West Australian forester and writer, Chairman of The Bushfire Front Inc.

The weather data for York is interesting for two reasons: (i) there has been a continuously reporting weather station here since 1877; and (ii) in 1996 the station was relocated from the rear of the Post Office in the centre of town to a farm paddock two kilometres away. The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) publishes separate weather data for each site. Thus it is possible to compare mean daily max and min temperatures for the period 1877-1995 with those for the period 1996-2006. (The 2007 data has not yet been published).

I found that the mean daily maximum temperature for the period 1996-2007 was 0.6 degrees warmer than the mean daily temperature over the previous 119 years. However, the mean daily minimum temperature for the decade 1996-2007 was 1.0 degree cooler than for the previous 119 years. This suggests that on average, overall, York has been marginally colder since 1996. In any case there is no evidence of “catastrophic warming” for this site.

Without the actual data (which is not freely available), it is impossible to test the statistical significance of these differences. In any case, I consider it more likely that any differences are due to the relocation of the weather station. The old Post Office site was surrounded by high stone walls and heat-absorbing/retaining brick buildings and car parks, whereas the new site is beyond the town in an open paddock.

I wrote to the BoM for comments on my analysis. In reply they presented a graph showing annual maximum and minimum temperature trends with a running 11-year mean combining both weather staions for York for the period 1910 to 2006. These reveal a roughly 1 degree increase in annual maximum temperature over the last 96 years and a roughly 0.3 degree increase in annual minimum temperature.

I wrote back to the BoM and asked why they chose 1910 as the starting point for their analysis. Their interesting reply was:

“A change in the type of thermometer shelter used at many Australian observation sites in the early 20th century resulted in a sudden drop in recorded temperatures which is entirely spurious. It is for this reason that these early data (pre-1910) are currently not used by the Bureau in monitoring climate change.”

I would be interested if anyone could refer me to an authoritative paper on the history, quality and anomalies in Australian weather records and the influence of the re-location of weather stations. I am aware, for example, that the Perth Western Australia weather station has been re-located at least three times over the years, each time to an area with an obviously different microclimate. How is this taken into account in determining real long term trends? And are there other key sites in the historical record for which temperature records have been artificially influenced by changes to thermometer shelters, or other technical aspects.

Roger Underwood is a former General Manager of the Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM) in Western Australia, a regional and district manager, a research manager and bushfire specialist. Roger currently directs a consultancy practice with a focus on bushfire management. He lives in Perth, Western Australia.

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‘Déjà Vu on the ABC’ by Roger Underwood was voted one of the best Australian blog posts of 2006.

Some of these stories are simply laughable, like the article asserting that a rise in temperature of 1-2 degrees will result in the extinction of the karri forest. Another reported that rising sea levels (caused by global warming) will, amongst other calamities, lead to a killer increase in salinity in the Swan River. Many readers were surprised by this, since the Swan River is a tidal estuary in its lower reaches, and is fed by the salt-laden Avon River in its upper reaches.

Day after day The West Australian delivers stories unequivocally foretelling the melting of ice caps and glaciers, death of forests, disease outbreaks, the collapse of agriculture, social disruption, loss of coastal communities and beaches, catastrophic storms, floods, droughts and bushfires. All of this is based on an unquestioning acceptance of the theory that human-induced CO2 emissions are causing the world to heat up, and an unquestioning belief in the link between projected warming and ghastly consequences.

I am curious about this lack of editorial scepticism. When it comes to reporting politics or community issues, journalists generally pride themselves on pricking sacred balloons, cutting down tall poppies, exposing spin and highlighting hidden agendas, in short doing what journalists do. The West Australian is quite good in this area, even if their judgement is not always infallible. They have not been afraid to attack government Ministers or powerful Union bosses or to probe politically-incorrect issues, such as alcoholism and education in Indigenous communities. But on global warming their stance is one of uncritical acceptance of Worst Case Scenarios. The whole package of political game-playing and agenda-driven alarmism is taken at face value and delivered on to readers as if the newspaper was a propaganda pamphlet, rather than a mature organ of the Australian media.
It is not just The West Australian. ABC current affairs journalists to a man and woman are also promoters of Global Warming Apocalypse. A good example was the recent segment on The 7.30 Report which suggested that a slight projected increase in temperature would result in a regime of completely unstoppable bushfires. This proposition was put to the gullible journalist by a climatologist and an environmental activist, neither of whom had any experience in bushfire science or management. No one with this knowledge or experience was interviewed.

And just before the Global Warming True Believers launch their barbs at me, I assure them that I accept the idea of climate change – the climate is always changing. I am also concerned about air pollution from industry and vehicles. However, I regard as unproven the theory of ‘accelerated global warming” as a result of human CO2 emissions. And I consider the worst-case scenarios uncritically presented as fact by journalists to be unhelpful to a community struggling to make sense of a complex issue.

There are risks associated with constant promotion of Worst Case Scenarios. The first is that people will start to shrug their shoulders, feeling that the whole situation is beyond hope: the planet is doomed, so we might as well live for the minute. This leads to the second risk: doomsday projections becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.
The one-sided reporting of the global warming debate is perhaps explained by the fact that journalists are frightened of presenting both sides of the global warming story. They do not want to alienate those powerful sections of the community who will attack them if they do, i.e. environmentalists, academics and business interests profiting from global warming alarm. Alternatively we are just seeing another example of the professional immaturity of the Australian media. I have observed that they have always regarded dramatic disasters and fearsome calamities as more newsworthy than everyday life or good citizenship. Thus trees being chainsawed to the accompaniment of wailing protesters is a far “better” story than a forest quietly regrowing under the stewardship of dedicated foresters. I can see no solution to this.

Roger Underwood
Perth, Western Australia

PS: I sent a copy of this article to the Editor of The West asking for any comments before I posted it on this blog. He did not reply. However, a week later a short article appeared with the first positive comment about global warming I have ever seen in this newspaper. The journalist reported the view of a marine scientist that global warming would lead to extensive new coral reefs forming all along the Western Australian coast, perhaps as far south as Perth. That will be nice.

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In September 14, 2006, I posted a piece entitled ‘Déjà Vu on the ABC’ by Roger Underwood which went on to win a place in the On Line Opinion best blogs competition for that year. This article is also about inaccurate and misleading media reporting of an environmental issue. Read more here: http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/001633.html.

I was thinking about prescience recently when reading a wonderful Russian memoir Last Boat to Astrakhan (Haupt, 1998). Robert Haupt was an Australian writer and traveller (he died just before this book was published) who spent five years in Russia between 1990 and 1996. Towards the end of this time he took a boat trip down the Volga River from Moscow to the ancient trading city of Astrakhan, where the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. The boat trip provides the backdrop to the book’s observations on Russia and Russians.

I found it especially interesting because I have always been fascinated by Russian history, especially the history of the 20th century. The years covered by Haupt’s book coincided with the demise of the Soviet empire and the start of Russia’s troubled journey towards democracy. ‘The barriers to progress,’ Haupt observed, ‘were as they were when Gogol named them: roads and idiots’. Nikolai Gogol, the 19th century Russian novelist had asked “why does a people so blessed with intelligence remain in thrall to fools? Why has a country that spans one-sixth of the world’s land surface remained so short of roads? Do the idiots rule because the roads aren’t there, or is it the want of roads that put idiots in charge?”

Russian history (not unlike history elsewhere) is replete with examples of fools in charge, but in Russia the fools very often seemed to be notably dangerous and ruthless. Haupt touches on the failures of the Romanovs (who for almost 300 years presided over a country in which the bulk of the population were either serfs or Counts), but provides his best insights into the Bolshevik and Communist eras, as well as the tragic consequences for ordinary Russians of the collapse of the USSR.

Haupt is also wryly humorous. For example he notes that the ugliness of Stalinist architecture is fortuitously counterbalanced by the inferiority of Stalinist concrete.

There is also a superb example of “reading the play”. Haupt recounts a conversation between the writer Andrei Sinyavski and a colleague at the Institute for World Literature in Moscow, some time in the early 1960s. Sinyavski believed his colleague was something of a liberal, and this encouraged him to speak freely. In Sinyavski’s words:

…one day I told him how hard I found it to live without freedom, and what a bad effect the lack of freedom had on Russia and Soviet culture. I argued that the Soviet State would not necessarily collapse if it lifted certain restrictions in the cultural sphere. If it allowed abstract art, if it published Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, and so on. If anything a slight thaw would benefit Russian culture and the Soviet State!

‘Of course the State won’t founder because of such trifles’ said my colleague. ‘But you are forgetting the effect all this would have on Poland’.

Thirty years before it occurred, Sinyavski’s colleague had read the fall of the dominos (the play) with uncanny accuracy, and he foretold the way in which the ultimate play (the collapse of the USSR) would unfold.

Haupt refers to the Soviet philosophy of cultural and intellectual repression as “the iron logic of empire”, and recounts how Sinyavski himself suffered from it, being sentenced in 1966 to seven years hard labour for publishing anti-Soviet writings abroad. Times had changed however. In the 1930s, the Communists would have got away with this, and no-one would have heard of Sinyavski ever again. In the 1970s Sinyavski became an international emblem of Breshnevian repression following the Krushchevian relaxation. To acute observers this reinforced the famous line of de Tocqueville that ‘there is no more dangerous moment for a repressive regime than the one at which it begins to reform itself’.

In Haupt’s view, and looking at it from the Soviet perspective, the most significant “error” made by the USSR was in not sending armoured divisions storming into Poland and crushing Solidarity as once they had stormed into Hungary and Czechoslovakia and crushed the embryo nationalist and socialist movements in those countries. Once Poland had been “allowed to get away with it” the house of cards started its inevitable collapse.

To me, one of the saddest stories in the book is about the Volga River itself. Once one of the world’s greatest and busiest commercial and domestic waterways, its management was progressively abandoned during the last years of the USSR. It has now become so silted up that ferries like the one on which Haupt travelled can no longer navigate its shallows, and the system of lights and markers has been allowed to decay beyond the point at which they are fixable.

Returning from Astrakhan on the voyage described in this book, the ferry finds itself on a stretch of river at night and with the navigation lights turned off. It takes the wrong channel and runs aground. The next day a tug is called to tow it off, but fails and the passengers are offloaded. Haupt sees this as a parable for the new Russian State: freed from communism, Russia has taken a dark stream, and has run aground. Tugs struggle to redress the calamity, while the Volga flows on……

Haupt is more of a historian and an observer than a “reader of the play” and he does not go on to predict the advent of the new Russia, with the ex-KGB Chief Vladimir Putin firmly in control of the government, the Mafia in control of commerce and the Chechins in revolt. But he does foreshadow the problems with environmental degradation, and the failure of the environmental managers, which may well turn out to be one of the greatest legacies of the Soviet era.

References:

Haupt, R (1998). Last Boat to Astakhan. Random House

Underwood P (2007) The Pros. (Manuscript)

Karri forests are part of the so-called “southern forests” of Australia’s southwest corner. They comprise about 1.3 million hectares of pure karri and karri mixed with jarrah, marri and red and yellow tingle. Apart from several outliers, such as at Boranup (near Margaret River) and Porongorup (east of Mt Barker), all of the present karri forest is found in areas with a long-term annual rainfall of >1100 mm.

However, the present karri forest is also a remnant. Analysis of pollen in geological strata has demonstrated that karri once occupied a very much wider area; indeed it is still possible to find typical karri forest understorey in moist gullies in the northern jarrah forest. The shrinkage of the karri forest appears to have resulted mainly from a decline in rainfall many thousands of years ago.

Karri is well able to survive much higher temperatures than those predicted. The species is adapted to a present-day climate which every summer experiences well above the average temperature, including days over 40 degrees. I have successfully grown karri in Perth and the Darling Ranges, regions with much warmer average temperatures than the lower southwest, and I even succeeded in establishing karri in my arboretum in the Avon Valley where the temperature exceeds 40 degrees day after day from January through to March. Karri was unaffected by these high temperatures. What killed them was winter frosts not summer heat. A feature of the current natural distribution of karri is that frost is very rare and when it does occur it is relatively mild and short-lived.

I believe that a predicted rise in average annual temperature of 2-3 degrees per se will not worry karri, especially if this occurs as a result of milder winters rather than hotter summers.

The problem of lower rainfall is another matter, and already forests all over the southwest of WA (especially wandoo and tuart) are observed declining in the face of below-average rainfall in recent years. The karri forest has also experienced a similar reduction in rainfall, but is not yet showing the same drought symptoms as wandoo and tuart. If there is another substantial decline in the current rainfall pattern, it probably will, unless some action is taken by forest managers.

Luckily something can be done to ameliorate the impact on the karri forest of lower rainfall. This is a well-planned and professionally conducted program of thinning of overstocked regrowth forests plus regular (7-9 year rotation) mild prescribed burning across the whole forest area. Such a program will lead to a higher proportion of rainfall getting through to recharge soil moisture, and will ensure less competition for water at the root zone. Prescribed burning will also reduce bushfire fuels and render old growth forests less susceptible to conversion to dense rainfall-gulping regrowth by high intensity summer fires.

Opponents of thinning and prescribed burning will immediately rise up and condemn this strategy, claiming that it will cause “a loss of biodiversity”. There is no scientific basis for this fear. But if no action is taken and Dr Wills’ doomsday predictions are correct, the biodiversity is going down the tube anyway. Even a 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will not stop the 2-3 degree killer temperature rise according to Dr Wills.

It is my understanding that the jury is still out on the link between a projected higher temperature due to global warming and a projected lower rainfall. Never mind. Even if “normal” rainfall patterns return to south-western WA, the forests will be healthier and more biologically diverse if overstocked regrowth stands have been thinned and mild burning undertaken to reduce fuels and thus minimise high intensity wildfires. And if the predictions of Dr Wills and his colleagues are right, well-managed forests will be better able to cope if a still-drier climate eventuates. The other good thing is that both thinning and burning are standard forestry operations which have been conducted for generations and subject to a great deal of research and monitoring. We know how to do it and that it will work, with no environmental downside.

Incidentally, Dr Wills is by not the first distinguished scientist to predict the extinction of Australia’s southwest forests. In the 1970s geography Professor Arthur Connacher predicted that logging for woodchip-quality logs would result in the “desertification” of the karri forest. Thankfully this has not occurred. And in the 1980s ecologist Dr Wardell-Johnson warned of the imminent loss of the tingle forests on the south coast due to “continental drift”. Australia was at that time thought to be drifting towards the equator at a rate of a few millimetres per century. It has also been too early to detect any evidence of this calamity.

Roger Underwood worked as a forester in the karri forest in the 1960s and 1970s.

It is estimated that nearly 70 lives have been lost and close to 200,000 hectares of agricultural land, national parks and mountain forests have been incinerated. The loss of olive groves is economically disastrous. Similarly the mountain forests are mostly coniferous, and unlike eucalypt forests, are destroyed by high intensity fire. Serious soil erosion and flooding can be expected in the coming winters.

Like southern Australia, Greece has a Mediterranean climate with cool, rainy winters and hot dry summers – ideal conditions for bushfires. Traditionally, however, it has not had disastrous all-consuming wildfires even in previous periods of below average rainfall. What is going on? It appears that the answer lies not in “global warming” as the usual people are inevitably saying, but in land use changes, mismanagement and inappropriate policy. Three things stand out:

1. Loss of land to traditional rural people. Over the last 20 years of so there has been a splurge of buying-up of small rural properties by wealthy people from European countries. A luxury holiday villa is built, and the new owners retire there, or pop in now and again to enjoy the warmth and beauty of the Greek mountains. However, just as when wealthy people from Perth buy their little vineyard in the karri forest, or move to a property on the edge of the bush in the hills, the first thing they do is try to change traditional land use practices, especially burning, and to introduce a “new environmental awareness”.

Mild burning in spring and autumn has been a practice of villagers and small land owners for centuries in Greece for all the usual reasons – including producing fresh grass for grazing, keeping the woods healthy and maintaining a low fire hazard. Increasingly burning has declined as the former land owners move to larger towns, and the new owners fail to do the job.

2. Transfer of bushfire responsibilities from land managers to emergency services. A few years ago the Greek government decided to take fire management responsibilities away from their Forestry Service and give them to the fire brigades. Almost immediately, routine burning programs in forest areas ceased. The bushfire service was confident it could tackle any fire, but this view was based on their experience with fires which occurred in forests which had been prescribed burnt for generations.

Once burning stopped, fuels began to accumulate, and when this fuel became dry in the current drought period, the resulting fires were unstoppable. As is so often the case world-wide, fire services tend to have a “suppression mentality” and do not sufficiently involve themselves in the essential work of bushfire preparedness and damage mitigation. Greek foresters could see it all coming, but did not have the political support to get anyone to face up to the coming crisis.

3. Reliance on technology. Greek authorities have been seduced into investing huge sums of money into aerial fire fighting technology. This was sold to them as the answer to the maiden’s prayer. At the same time, traditional ground-based systems, including access for fire fighters and old-fashioned pre-suppression work, were allowed to run down. The result: when there were many simultaneous fires, the new system was simply overwhelmed. There were not enough water bombers to tackle a large number of small fires, and then when the small fires rapidly became large and intense, the water bombers were ineffective.

Australian bushfire specialists listen to all this with a rueful expression on their faces, or roll their eyes with despair.

Analysis of the massive bushfires in Victoria, ACT and NSW in recent years indicate exactly the same patterns have emerged in Australia, with almost exactly the same result.

We have been lucky that only a small number of lives have been lost. But this may not be the case in the next bad fire season. If Australian governments continue to go down the line of replacing land managers with emergency services, investing in massive aerial technology instead of permanent staff and preparedness programs on the ground, and allowing bushfire policies to be dictated by people from the inner suburbs of the big cities who have no practical experience, the bushfire situation will only get worse here, as it has in Greece.

Roger Underwood is a former General Manager of CALM in Western Australia, a regional and district manager, a research manager and bushfire specialist. Roger currently directs a consultancy practice with a focus on bushfire management. He lives in Perth, Western Australia.