Bushfires have burnt more than 1.2 million hectares (4,600 square miles) of Australia this summer.
Some blame the ferocity of this year’s fires on global warming, others on inadequate control burning claiming that fuel loads in many forests are too high.
Bob McDonald has a very different perspective suggesting that both the frequency of bushfires and fuel reduction burning has increased over the last two decades in parts of eastern Australia and that in some situations the best strategy is to not undertake any controlled burning as potential fuel, including leaf litter and wood, will be quickly broken down by termites, bacteria and fungi:
“The frequency of both fuel reduction burning and fires have increased over the last twenty years in many locations. There may be no relationship between the two, but I suspect that in some situations more frequent burning is contributing to more fires.
My grandmother was saved by her father cutting and bleeding her hand when she was bitten by a snake. He didn’t actually do the right thing but she believed he did – was calm and survived.
If anyone had argued with the my great grandfather on the day he cut his daughters hand I likely would not be here to write this – so I respect all those views contrary to mine on an issue for which many have strong and personal or professional views and I am prepared to be wrong – but first we need to have an objective look at what has happened with fuel reduction burns in the last twenty years on a site by site basis.
I have fought fires in several places and I am interested in questions relating to what does not burn, when vegetation burns, how hot does it burn and which fires can ignite what kinds of dead wood.
Wire grass, for example, explodes but you can run through it without getting burnt.
In the 1983 Ash Wednesday Fires at Mount Macedon (on a south westerly wind) frequently burnt as well as bush with that went up in a crown fire and also burnt. A fire from the north just 10 days before the Ash Wednesday Fires, a wet gully of ferns and old trees on the south side of the Mount Macedon ridgeline held up a grass fire for two hours enabling water bombinmg and eventually being put out.
In 2003 roughly 500,000 hectares of forest from East Gippsland to Canberra was burnt. When fires two weeks ago reached this area, burnt less than three years ago, they not only burnt but ‘took off’. This would suggest that in some situations re-growth is more flammable than un-burnt areas and that in some cases a significant amount of fuel reduction burning could actually increase the frequency of bushfires.
In East Gippsland, while developing a Community Fire Protocol to manage fuel reduction burning, locals pointed out that rainforest gullies slowed fires and it was a good idea not to burn them in fuel reduction burns.
In coastal rainforests strips in northern NSW there is no fuel the litter life is so intense that even leaves remain in a light single layer and fallen timber rapidly becomes soil.
Termites play a big role here, along with fungi and bacteria. If it was burnt this forests’s capacity to rot timber would be significantly reduced.
It will take time for people to feel comfortable with letting the bush grow out in places where no-fire is, in my opinion, the best hazard reduction strategy. All vegetation burns, dead and alive, but some burns better than others. Fuel reductions fires in sandy country in the south that generate braken invariably increase braken denisty, height and the fire hazard – and often kill thin barked eucalypts like Manna Gums, for instance
Bob McDonald,
South Gippsland.”
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I cannot totally agree with Bob’s assessment of bushfire and fuel reduction burning. Yes there does appear to be a greater number of bushfires today than perhaps 20 years ago. However this may just be perception as fire fighting practices have changed with the redistribution of public lands amongst different management agencies. Response to fire appears to be not as rapid as in the past nor as intensive with the result that fires are now achieving a greater size and intensity.
Fuel reductioni in the past was conducted over greater areas and achieved a finer mosaic across the landscape.Especially in former State Forest.
Today fuel reduction is difficult to implement due to bureaucratic constraints and other legislation such as clean air act etc.
The changing nature of the forest workforce and their spatial distribution during the working week also needs to be taken into acount. Rapid response to fire is only as good as the ability to put a crew in ASAP froom when the fire is first noticed. With much of the former FNSW estate now under NPWS management the spatial and temporal distribution of bush crews has changed such that rapid response is no longer an option in many situations. This is not intended as a critisism but as a statement of an unintended consequence of the NSW RFA’s.
When this reduction in trained bush crews and their local knowledge is taken into acount (with the reduction in fire fighting equipment and machinery)together with the inability to implement fuel reduction burning in the cooler months it is little wonder that fires are becoming more frequent and increasing in intensity.
The human element is often not discussed in relation to fire management but it is the most vital element for an affective fire managegment strategy.
There is no increase in either the frequency or area of fuel reduction buring on the east coast. If you look at the annual reports from the various state land management agencies you will see a continuing decline in the area fuel managed. Bob is confusing forest types wet and dry in his observations. He is also not accounting for the large areas of dieback affected forests where fire and the lack of seem to be the only common denominator.
Bob,
My impression (from Western Australia) is that prescribed burning has greatly declined over the past twenty years, due to politico-bureaucratic restrictions, complaints about smoke over cities, lobbying by environmentalists, loss of skilled fire staff etc. I may be wrong. Does anybody have the precise figures?
On the decay of litter, it is true that this takes place in moist gullies, but in most of the dry eucalypt areas, leaf (stick, bark etc) shed exceeds leaf decay each year. This is partly due to dryness, and partly to very low nitrogen levels. Eucalypts seem to prepare the ground for the fire that gives them an advantage over other trees. Exclude fire for long periods, and we will lose a lot of the eucalypts, as is actually happening.
I am all for a fine mosaic of burnt and unburnt, but naive widescale fire exclusion (as in WA National Parks, and I believe others) defeats this aim. When fire eventually occurs, it results in complete burn out of ridges, valleys, gullies and all, so a simplified landscape. Less diversity of habitat and feeding opportunities. More dead animals. Death of old growth trees.
Only widespread regular, light burning can give the patchiness and fire safety we need. There have been several papers on this recently, which support the local knowledge of many land owners and fire-fighters. I am about to submit a paper on it.
There are many references, but space on a blog is limited, so I only give a few recent ones. The prescribed burning debate continues in the USA (e.g. Keeley vs. Minnich), but I think most environmentalists there are in favour of a return to something like Native American burning. Smokey Bear is rather on the nose.
Refs: Fernandes and Botelho (2003) A review of prescribed burning effectiveness in fire hazard reduction. Int. J. of Wildland Fire 12:117-128.
King et al. (2006) Simulation of prescribed burning strategies in south-west Tasmania, Australia: effects on unplanned fires, fire regimes, and ecological management values. Int. J. Wildland Fire 15:527-540
Loehle (2004) Applying landscape principles to fire hazard reduction. Forest Ecology and Management 198:261-267.
Bob, your key statement, that fuel reduction burning has increased, is 100% wrong. Some areas may have been back burned to reduce the impact of wildfires but that is not “fuel reduction burning”.
Fuel reduction burning has been emasculated by red tape and corruption of the public liability principles.
You seem to have fused any past burn, including past conflagrations, into the one concept of fuel reduction burning and then reached totally wrong conclusions. The stuff that was burned in 2003 has burned again in 2006 because of the intensity of the 203 fire.
This left epicormic growth all the way up the stems of any survivors and this linked the understorey with the canopy in a way that multiplied the intensity of the 2006 fire.
The only valid conclusion to make from this is that negligent wildfires create conditions that replicate themselves every few years. The right time to do the cold burns over all the area damaged in 2003 was the winter/spring of 2004 or 2005. This would have burned off the epicormic growth and thinned out the thick regeneration in a way that would have restored the forest structure and produced more moist conditions that would have severerly retarded the 206 lightning strikes.
Some intensive grazing of key corridors would also have helped considerably.
Bob,
As a former District and Regional Forester, with 40-odd years of bushfire experience in the jarrah and karri forests, I am unable to support your views on two issues.
1. The area of annual prescribed burning in WA forests has dropped dramatically in recent years. From about 1965 to 1990 the annual area was around 300,000 ha. This equated to about a 5-6 year burn rotation for the jarrah forest and a 7-8 year rotation in the karri. This provided very effective protection againstlarge high intensity fires. The annual area burnt over the last decade or so is meant to be about 200,000 ha, but this has not been achieved for a long time, and fuel ages are now being allowed to baloon out to 18 or 20+ years in many parts of the forest. WA is now again experiencing large, high intensity forest fires. My heart goes out to our firefighters – they are being asked to do the impossible, that is, to suppress forest fires in areas with very heavy dry fuel.
2. Leaving eucalypt forests long unburnt does not result in less fuel, but more. This has been demonstrated repeatedly in comparative studies in reference areas located in the jarrah and karri forests, including areas which are now 50+ years unburnt. Its hard to walk through these areas, let alone fight a fire in them. Only last weekend I was in the Warren National Park, an area of beautiful mature forest which has not been burned for fuel reduction for way too long, and I found I simply could not get off the track other than by crawling under dense scrub and suspended bark and leaves which were over head-height and totally impenetrable. A fire on even a relatively mild day in this forest will be very intense, and controllable only at the flanks with heavy bulldozers.
3.Global Warming, if it is real, will lead to slightly higher temperatures and drier fuels in the forest. Perhaps there will be effective means developing of slowing or reversing this warming, if it occurs. But in the short term this is only one way to combat this threat, the reduction of the tonnage of flammable fuel on the forest floor by planned mild, rotational burning. This is not a “scorched earth policy” as it is sometimes portrayed by those who do not understand the role of fire in the eucalypt ecology. On the contrary it not only helps to protect forests from killer fires, it leads to healthier and more beautiful forests.
Roger Underwood
* locals pointed out that rainforest gullies slowed fires and it was a good idea not to burn them in fuel reduction burns.*
I quite agree, they are like a “green curtain”. Much of the vegetation is inflammable, or barely flammable. try to burn a stand of acmena, you will have buckleys chance of getting sustainable ignition. Where we lived, we had fires raging around us but never a flame crossed onto our property – blocked by swampy wetlands and rainiforest gullies. Where the fire tried to gain access we just went down and put it out, it was not of any great ferocity.
Those living on ridge tops or at the head of a gully can expect an entirely different scenario.
This is where local knowledge plays a big part, however the integrity of what constitutes as “local knowledge” is now debatable with the sudden influx of treechangers, absentee landlords and enthusiastic feel good volunteers.
Yes Rog,
Local knowledge is important, and must be respected. The Esplin Report (2003) recommended this. But what has been done to implement it? Nothing as far as I know.
Have local groups pressed the point politically? It seems to me that it all needs to be collated and published. Might the Stretton Group (in Victoria) be the appropriate body to do so? In WA we have the Bushfire Front, composed of experienced forest fire managers. Why don’t they publish a book of their combined knowledge? Other states may have similar organisations. Could the IPA play a role in this?
When I said “Much of the vegetation is inflammable” I meant much of the vegetation is not inflammable.
Inflammable and flammable are the same thing.
With regards to the issue of ‘local knowledge’ used at fires in NSW.
The local Bushfire Management Committees have been directed to have people with local knowledge on their incident teams and be identified in their management plans.
Unfortunately these are generally the same people who will be on the fire line.
At the moment it is the group captains who would fill this need in the incident management teams.
With regard to hazard reductions an example is that during Christmas 2001, a large fire burnt out a section of pine forest near the National Zoo and Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra. In can be argued that this stopped the 2003 fires burning onto Black Mtn reserve and then carrying the fire into central Canberra. Removing fuel is the only option land managers have in manageing the intensity of bushfires.
Following the 2003 fires and the Esplin promises were made to listen to local knowledge more. Subsequently, a community meeting was held sometime after in Bruthen, which I attended.
The meeting began with the local fire manager for DSE declaring that this meeting was to been treated like a “friendly chat around a campfire” and that all said was to be “off the record”. I thought this was rather strange. Why off the record? but anyhow…..
Maps were produced showing plans for future, more extensive, fuel reduction programs. He asked if anybody had any particular areas of concern.
I commented that it was all very well to put emphasis on asset protection zones but this only covered an area extending no more than 1 kilometre from town and that there were areas beyond this point, between Bruthen and Tambo Crossing that were extremely thick with fuel, with substantial amounts of that country having not seen fire in 80+ years.
The forest types were dominated by dry eucalypt or derivatives of and I felt a fire getting lose in this country, just above our town, under bad weather conditions was going to rapidly grow into a monster, affecting areas in the path of the fire for many, many kilometers, especially due to the embers such high volume of fuel would create.
Essentially, he just brassed me off suggesting I get in contact with the ecological managers, as that was an ecological burning zone and this meeting was about asset protection. He suggested, with a reassuring smile, that the area I was talking about was far enough away (2 kilometers) from town, not to be concerned and that proposed asset protection zone burns would be adequate to protect the town.
When you then contact the ecological experts they either haven’t got enough information on a species and its response to fire, are concerned about an endangered species within the area or site a lack of funding. Every excuse under the sun.
This area has now burnt in these wildfires and it was this part of the fire, that carried the high intensity fire a distance of 20 kilometers overnight from Bruthen into Tambo Crossing, causing havoc for them up there. I could only imagine the fire built up a huge head of steam as it rapidly grew in size passing through this part of the forest, that had 40-70+ tons to the hectare. Meleleuca patches 8-14 ft in height grew thickly over some hillsides, sometimes covering entire hillsides for more than a kilometer. Christ, it must have been an awesome sight as it burnt in there.
The forest is decimated. Nothing left on the ground at all. I suspect Koalas that were released there recently as part of a relocation program are gone. Gee, all that backslapping and champagne for nothing.
I suspect nobody will be let into these places until some trees and plants start shooting, to give some relief to the eye, as the current blackness will surely invoke a guaranteed universal response. Fk me, look what’s happened.
The asset protection zones. What is the philosophy behind this jargon. Who is this supposed to make feel good? The departments consultants.
The lack of burning in these asset protection zones is often blamed on a small window of opportunity to do so. Many locals with sound burning experience dispute this. Departments are hiding behind their own red tape. To dangerous they say. People complain about the smoke they say. What crap.
Then low and behold. A massive wildfire rears its ugly head and the department begins to backburn asset protection zones left, right and centre. Even Special Protection Zones previously designated in such areas and managed as ‘fragile’ landscapes, where activities such as domestic firewood collection is banned, are now torched over large areas and burnt to the ground. We had a SPZ in our forest interface. One of it’s purposes was to protect the Sooty Owl. Is there an irony there somewhere.
Bob M. thanks for fighting fires. Much appreciated but as for your comments on no fuel reduction burning necessary, etc. etc., please, go away and stay away. As I suggested in another post, get your walking shoes on and go and visit some of the badly hit areas and see for yourself the result.
The forests I have visited so far are obliterated at ground level. Entire ground cover has been removed. Virtually all of the scrub has been burnt to ground level. Where thick stands of melaleuca once stood little charcoal stubs, 2 inches high are left. Over large areas where I have been so far, every single tree has had its canopy burnt off completely or has had all or most of the leaves on it browned off. Rocks, including bedrock, along creek banks has ‘exploded’ in some instances turning a reddish pink in color. Found a number of eucalyptus trees snapped off halfway up, some seemingly twisted off. Couldn’t find any animal corpses in the heavily burnt areas nor could I smell any death, despite the lack of vegetation now allowing the breezes to come straight through over good distances. The animals killed were probably vaporized.
We better hope we don’t get heavy rain in these areas for a little while. The erosion events that could be triggered will be horrendous. In fact it could likely prove equally as destructive as the fire itself.
To Dave in particular: I decided a few hours ago to give the blog a miss. All this latest topic meandering is taking us nowhere. I decided tonight that if I have to read another NP Draft Management Scheme via the Internet I will scream. Firstly they are all the same in the end; secondly we have collectively learnt nothing since I first got curious about man made fires in the wilderness over thirty years ago. Back then I took to the air for an extra sticky beak over places where we were banned.
The report in question tonight was about Melaleuca in SW Tas. where there is a hint of someone returning to ancient practice in the forlorn hope of saving the hapless orange bellied parrot. Obviously the drafting authors have not seen a decent fire running with the wind in that country any time over a dry summer. In a bad year those fires can smoulder for on months waiting to spring back into life round every edge.
I wrote recently our NP’s anywhere tend to burn from end to end. In our violent heyday shearwater rookeries could be decimated. That’s because nobody knows how to either put them out in time or limit the damage. I say it’s still a lost art and with even moderate global warming our birds and everything else are in real peril.
What should be most obvious to anyone reading that draft Management Plan the whole place was previously managed by just a handful of people without scientific practice runs or public reports even after our invasion of the region.
Allan could well guess I commented a little late on his fire and the local NP however “Unfortunately these are generally the same people who will be on the fire line” is a curious statement considering the chain of recent events.
Dave: I have just acquired a large collection of old time music on CD. After a quick glance it seems every other one in nearly a thousand albums has been switched through the covers. I could return to the blog with a proven strategy for perfect filing but on just a casual listening here and there it should be quite a while.
Thanks for your input on the topic of sending bits of fires quickly back on themselves etc. however the world at large can get lost for now.
Thanks Allan and Stewie,
You both obviously talk from real experience. Funny how the ring of truth is so clear. The obvious truth is that fire, like many things in life, can be good or bad, depending on circumstances. Friend or foe, master or servant.
Sadly, the broadscale fire exclusion proposed by some academics is plainly ludicrous and disastrous, as has been proved time after time after time.
Gavin: Sorry to see you have retired from the fray, but I can sympathise. It is exhausting. However, the battle needs to be fought. Sane bushfire policy must prevail in the end if Australia is to survive. That’s worth fighting for, isn’t it?
Bob McDonald: Are you still there? Understanding different scales is vital in ecology. There is truth in what you say about moist gullies. That’s how some rare, fire intolerant plants and animals have survived (Wollemi Pines?). But, thinking at a wider scale, such rarely burnt gullies can only survive if protected by plenty of burning around them. I don’t know if you had the opportunity, or time, to read the references I posted. The recent modelling by Karen King (2006) and others found four things (my interpretation, open to comment) These are:
1. When prescribed burning is added to the areas burnt by wildfires, the total area burnt is increased.
2. However, prescribed burning reduces the number and average area of wildfires.
3. When a certain minimum percentage of an area (it may vary from place to place, Karen gave 10% for Tasmanian button grass, eucalypt, rainforest mix) is burnt by prescribed fire in any year, wildfires that do occur can be controlled.
4. Intelligent placement of prescribed burns can improve their effectiveness.
None of this will surprise experienced fire fighters, in fact the findings may seem rather banal. The point is that there is now the sort of academic proof that some seem to need. It’s a bit like scientific proof that parachutes work. But let us rejoice that the truth is emerging, in various ways.
Oh, the American researcher, Craig Loehle, using percolation theory, found similar results. In his model, at least 30% of the landscape needed prescribed burning in any year to achieve ‘fire safety’. This was for random prescribed burning. If prescribed burning was strategically placed (for example fire prone ridges) then only about 10% of the landscape needed prescribed fire in any year. Without any prescribed fire, there was, inevitably, almost total burnout when a wildfire occurred.
Have we done prescribed burning to death now? All it needs is some clear thinking and courage at the political and bureaucratic levels to avoid future, further bushfire disasters. Perhaps some academics need to think more clearly too.
Ian,
Your statement of disagreement to Bob’s key statement (“fuel reduction has increased”) is totally correct. (His assumption is totally flawed.)
The three decades leading into the 2002-3 fires as per the Auditor Generals figures achieved 1.24% of the scientifically based fuel reduction requirements of 10% in the vegetation types that were totally obliterated in that fire.
These vegetation types consisted, slopes grassy woodland, dry and wet sclerophyll, montane and alpine, cool and temperate rain, and also their riparian systems.
Even if half the fuel reduction requirements had been met over the 30 year period it would have left a mosaic of biota to withstand the 2006-7 fires.
It is also common knowledge that intense fires alter the PH balance of our forest soils, hence they become more acidic.
This leads to short life terminal species leaving a dead vertical fuel load to intensify the next fire sequence which plumes and crowns.
In many cases this alters the ratio of non coppicing and suckering eucalyptus species, leading to an altered ratio in regeneration and the delivery of down flow hydrology to our catchments, which is significantly depleted.
Under a cool carpet burn ecology that forms a natural mosaic there is also a webbing of protective vegetable matter residue at ground level which protects the organic and microbic balance, subsequently nutrients are held in the local geography where they are needed.
In the case of heavy rain sequences after an intense fire event a massive transfer of local nutrient is then delivered into the local river systems with dire consequences, including heavy siltation, oxygen depletion, algal blooms, poor quality potable water and fish kills.
I have put this short post together with the assistance from the Executive of “Wildfire Taskforce Inc.”
Jennifer I will email some photos of the fires aftermath for your personal reference which further substantiate the above.
Thanks, Stewie, your post got me thinking on how much of the lower Snowy catchment was subjected to another broadscale clearfire and what impact this, and the subsequent regrowth, is having on water yields, siltation etc which has, to date, been blamed on upstream water diversions.
Gavin, I’m sorry that I didn’t express myself clearly.
What I meant by “Unfortunately they are the etc,etc” there is now a small group of people that Incident Management Teams (IMT)can call on for local knowledge and that these same people would generally be members of their local brigade. Cant be in two places a once.
The IMT can be doing their planning 60, 70 plus km’s away from the actual fire, so the person with local knowledge may prefer to actually be at the fire.
The IMT is a reasonable high stress place.
Having someone like a ‘La Pantera Rosa’ with all her passion would not be first choice to provide local knowledge.
There has to be some care selecting people to work in the IMT when a Section 44 fire is burning.
I know that many rural firefighters are also retiring from the fray, tired of BS that goes along with current system.
The only thing I know for certain is that the Australian bush will still burn whatever management practice is in place and we will still be having coronials into fires to find out what went wrong.
I have just re-read Peter Clack’s book on the Canberra fires (Firestorm: Trial by Fire 2003) – it’s worth a read if anybody has not. Given the politico-bureaucratic farce described by Peter, which he says prevented fast attack when some fires were small, I am reminded of the Bard of Avon.
“A little fire is quickly trodden out, which, being suffered, rivers cannot quench.” William Shakespeare, Henry VI, 1592.
However, this contradicts Peter Clack’s claim that Poms know nothing about fire, and are responsible for the ecomythology taught in some Australian universities.
Allan, you are right about the loss of experienced fire fighters but it is not just retirement. Many simply refuse to risk their lives in situations that are made far more dangerous than need be by fools who refuse to listen to the voice of experience.
They don’t mind protecting their own community but most of the forests have been alienated from their community through fraud and deception.
The urban greens have made their attitude to shared common property very clear – whats yours is theirs and whats theirs stays theirs. So why should we help them hang on to stolen goods?
If they really want to save the forests then all they need to do is give them back. It will take a while to sink in but it will eventually. I just hope there will be sufficient wildlife left to start again.
In the mean time the message is quietly getting through. The wives usually have the final say.
And since the total clearing bans it is surprising how many farmers are now letting the regen take over and the fuel build up in the key fire corridors that they had always kept clear in the past. To them, the trees they used to protect are now just a pain in the ass that attracts the kind of scum that no-one would want to deal with. And if it is OK for government boofheads to wipe out a million hectares then why bother about a lazy hundred freehold hectares here and there?
The public will eventually discover that no-one can manage a landscape without the goodwill of those who live in it. But anything more subtle than a desert will go right over their heads. Gee wiz, must be that global warming that did it.
Yes, global warming seems to be the flavour of the month. That other thread about the Barrier Reef is like a shark feeding frenzy, with words instead of teeth.
It seems odd to me that climate attracts so much attention – is it media driven? I have said elswhere that I see climate, water and bushfire as the three big, interlinked Australian environmental issues.
Of the three, bushfire is the most urgent, having an annual time horizon – we need plenty of prescribed burning before next summer. Water is next – decadal time horizon. Climate has a century, or even millenium horizon.
I know little about the science, but I suspect the whole brouhaha may yet prove to be another Y2K. I am pretty sure the current drought is just a cycle.
Yes, Davey, the contrast with the other threads is very informative. Here we have a quiet informed discussion that focusses on actual causes, effects and solutions with only minimal dross.
The other posts are subject to a co-ordinated campaign of disruption by a number of people using multiple pseudonyms from different PC’s. The result is that they produce a lot of heat and red herrings, no solutions, take a lot of space, waste the time of both contributors and readers but give the impression of a popular debate.
I would rather have a quiet chat with a few who know their stuff any day. But all that noise merely reinforces my view that the best response is to let them put their own fires out. Give em all a real dose of reality.
I posted in support of Allen and tried to share my fire experiences but Jennifer censors me (at Ian\’s urge). My post was short, polite and supportive. I also agree with Davey on issues for immediate focus.
Wonder why Jennifer won\’t me let me show my support opinion that you\’re bound to agree with? She wants to hide any areas of agreement. Now Jennifer is using a beastly tactic of divide and conquer.
Posted by: La Pantera Rosa at February 2, 2007 11:34 AM
LPR/Pinxi, we had exchanged emails off line in which i asked you to stick to a few blog rules, or your IP would be blocked. you indicated you would respect no rules and continue to disrupt the blog. so i attempted to block your IP. you are now posting comment from a variety of differnt IPs. I am mostly treating them as junk and deleting them straight away. if you wish to email me off line and let me know you will 1. keep the same name, 2. not clog threads, 3. not deliberately defame etcetera i am happy to reconsider my approach.
Hello Pantera,
I know they are all being really mean, but, Jennifer willing, I am interested in your environmental priorities (no eye-glazing cut and paste now!) and fire experiences. It may soothe you to give the Barrier Reef feeding frenzy a rest. I am sure it will soothe Jen. I think Luke is enjoying himself – let’s leave him be.
With regard to environmental priorities, I would have thought that any politician would rank them the same way as I do, from shortest time horizon to longest, for obvious electoral reasons. Those who rank climate first must be true states…-er-persons, or they hope to bury the truth about bushfire in an ‘expert’ inquiry, with a suitably fat and glossy report when the smoke has cleared. I must be a bushfire cynic, but some of us recognise a cycle when we see it.
Look, the consistent thread in all this whales/GW/fires/GBR/MDB/biodiversity/god-knows-what-else stuff is that due to the vagueness of the projections alarm can be safely generated.
What is perplexing is why? is it because those that produce these alarming scenarios are
a) projecting their own personal states of anxiety
b) politically motivated to cause disruption to the present government
c) seeking acknowledgement and confirmation from other anxious persons of their relevance of their fears.
Anyway, I just bought a yacht so I am going for a sail.
Sorry, I am going of post but just a tad. Frustration has got a hold.
I have been informed today that no access into burnt areas will be granted until at least the end of April.
This is despite the fact that quite a number of arterial roads and tracks have already been cleaned up and are in a safe state. Sure, the odd tree along the road may fall in the next little while but you would have to be pretty unlucky for it to land on your car.
Of course the real reason, as I see it, is they want some green regrowth to relieve the blackness of the current landscape. They want some of the regrowth (esp. coppicing up the trunks) to establish a little, to block your view, for at the moment, you can see for considerable distances through the burnt areas, as there is no leaf or scrub matter to hinder your view. So the scorched earth that lies at your feet, you can see goes on and on into the distance. The simplest of minds or least experienced may quickly extrapolate and conclude that any fauna could not have possibly survived in these areas.
A person could easily be convinced that fires of such intensity, that produce such devastation, are not ecologically sustainable ones. The impact of seeing it is not the sort of public education program these departments obviously want.
With such departmental protocols in place how, could anybody possibly believe anything that comes from these people. It’s a laugh to think that on other issues (AGW), infinitly more complex than the issue of reducing wildfire intensity, they are pretending to predict the weather 20, 50 or 100 years from now.
Stewie, gather as big a crowd as you can get and just bowl on in there. Take lots of eggs and over ripe tomatoes to deal with issues of access and make absolutely certain that you have a video camera in the face of any departmental pond scum that try to stop you.
Get lots of footage of no animals, or dead animals and get a properly documented record of as many scenes as you can. Get creek beds for before and after shots of erosion etc. You need to act, for your own well being, as there is nothing more destructive than passively enduring.
So kick on. You will feel more alive than ever, enjoy yourselves, ridicule boofheads. If they threaten you with a fine, take them on. The judge will give you a hard spank with a drinking straw and you will have the best dinner anecdote money can buy. Carpe diem.
In the Adelaide hills in the spring of 1994, the CFS {fire services}started some experiments in ‘controlled burning’!..Areas were gridded off in the hills in one metre squares, ground detritis was removed measured and even weighed from each square!..The pegged and taped area was left for a period of 90 days..Then the CFS went back and did it again!..When the results were compared to the first clearing, it was discovered that the ground detritis was the same, and in some grids, more than the original clearing!This, to me brings in doubts about the value of control burning!..Gum tree’s are brittle things, one big wind and its all on the ground again!When you control burn, this kills a fair bit of the gum tree, this, after a while falls to the ground and forms detritis!..Controlled burnings effectivness is nothing more than a political myth!
Don’t worry Ian, that was my intention in the first place. I was just trying to do the right thing and trying to get ‘official’ permission is all.
Thanks for the support though.
My local MP is currently trying to attain us a special permit to enter these areas but…….
The authorities can threaten us till they’re blue in the face but our dedication to revealing the truth of this matter far exceeds the attempts of the authorities to hide the truth.
As a matter of interest, do you know what their power of authority as far as denying access is in this case? No state of emergency was declared, you could argue the bush can be a dangerous place at anytime, they have already cleaned up the roads/tracks, there is nothing left to burn and all the crews have pulled out of this area.
We know it is safe enough out there now, we are not going to be getting in anybodies way and records need to be taken of the fires aftermath. Now.
Interestingly, I have been told the department is offering a half hour course over the internet that, once passed, qualifies the person to assist wildlife rescue teams in rescuing injured wildlife. Anybody from anywhere, no bush experience necessary, is offered this course. I spoke to a leader at one of the wildlife shelters, a very experienced person herself in the bush, who expressed her deep concern at allowing people from the urban areas, with no bush experience, to go into these burnt out areas. She was rightly concerned for their safety.
Another ‘community participation’ publicity stunt, I’m sure.
I haven’t bothered with doing this ‘course’, as you have to be accompanied by a park ranger at all times when in the field and apart from cramping my style, if he is of the ‘wrong character’ me and him/her might not get on to well.
You could always drop him down a smouldering stump hole.
I am not certain but I suspect the worst they can do, provided you are not taking anything away but photos, is charge you with trespass. Possibly refusal to obey a lawful instruction but whatever it is, frame it, as a badge of honour.
Laurie, if you seriously think that constitutes a definitive experiment then god help anyone near you in a bushfire. It would only take a passing wallaby or scratching Bush Turkey or Mallee fowl to spread detritus from adjacent areas to a single one metre square. (Or only one green slime ball to bodge up the experiment). This would especially be the case if the removed fuel was not completely removed from the site.
Come back when you can say the same thing about a 1000 metre square, or in fact, a 20 hectare cold burn, and you might merit another 60 seconds of our time.
Laurie Hirst,
From your post you seem rather naive about prescribed burning and its effectiveness. Have you talked to anyone who has actually attended, observed and fought a number of bushfires? Also, try reading some of the latest published work on the subject, as given in my post of 31 Jan (11.37am). You will find that modelling by Karen King (and others, 2006) of the Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre lends strong support to the value of prescribed burning in a Tasmanian landscape. They recommend that about 10% of the area needs to be burnt each year to keep fires within a reasonable size.
Craig Loehle (2004) showed a similar result by percolation modelling. He found (for any landscape) that, with random placement of prescribed burns, burning at least 30% of the landscape achieved a marked reduction in the number and size of wildfires. With clever strategic placement, only 10% needed burning each year. Without any prescribed burning there was, eventually, complete burnout, as happened in Victoria, Canberra etc. My own modelling confirms this.
Not that models are really needed. Any baggy arsed fire fighter can tell you that prescribed burning is not an option to be debated. It is essential if we want to conserve both nature and human society. I am sorry to repeat myself, but you seem not to have learnt (possibly not read) the information that has been contributed on this blog about bushfire.
If you want to talk about the subject, join your local Bushfire Brigade, and attend a few hundred fires. Until then, you are like a flying instructor who has never been off the ground.
Hi all, an interesting discussion. As to the frequency of fuel reduction burns – the eastern forest of Victoria have now almost entirely been burnt within the last two years – and you can add most of the Grampians and a good size chunk of Wilson’s Promontory in addition to s series of ecological burns and escapes in South Gippsland and around the west coast.
Nationally, n addition to planned fuel reduction burns, there has been private land burns, government and ‘academic burns’, accidental fires and those lit by the pyromaniacs. All these fires, in addition to wildfires achieve a degree of furl reduction – and I used too loose a definition. Particularly in SE Australia there is an increased fire frequency in the last twenty years – all fires.
It is not just frequency of fires – but the area they cover, their intensity, the nature of the bush they are burning – but I defer to Western Australians – I know little of their bush.
The change in approach to fires in Victoria, letting them burn, moving them around with back burns and standing back is further complicated with a number of fire fighting bureaucracy issues for CFA volunteers, contract and DSE staff.
I am very wary of the notion of burning 10 or 30% of the landscape in a given year – maybe I have misread something here – as quoted as advice in Tasmania by ‘Davey’.
Botanists in my experience are blinded by plant biodiversity yielded by fires but almost invariably fail to take into account mammal and bird species, let alone frogs and reptiles etc. Well known botanists and even zoologists have incautiously advocated more frequent burning in the SE – often quoting Aboriginal fires. Very dodgy business given there are few records of burning practices in the SE and the forest were dominated by old hollow trees – forcing those from the first fleet to go to Norfolk Island for ship building timbers.
For academically driven burns there needs to be far greater accountability – both scientifically in terms of comprehensive pre and post fire surveys – and practically – and taking into account other users, the landscape and its utility for shelter, water etc..
Orange Bellied Parrots lack salt marsh in Victoria – not burnt bits of their Tasmanian habitat. I shudder at the risk of burning Melaleucas where they breed. Far too often ‘academic burns’ are destructive, pointless and poorly managed on the day.
Burning the last remnant vegetation on road and in other small reserves too is pointless, especially when they are surrounded by highly flammable dry paddocks in summer.
Similarly bureaucratically inspired fires from a range of government bodies are too often poorly planned and executed – especially when the timing is other than that set by the actual conditions of a given area.
There is no room for political fires either like Wilson’s Prom with macho foresters determined to burn the park which virtually and island surround by sea with a recorded history of wet ancient forests. They even spent an extra month cutting a huge east west fire break – a great potential fuse – and all the while being paid a fortune of taxpayer’s money to watch peat smoulder while tourism died
For the rest of us left with fire safety issues it is worth carefully and practically looking at the history of fires in a given area and being more cautious when the bush is reduced to isolated patches surrounded by farmland. Dry paddocks burn faster, hotter and kill more people than fires in bush in the same conditions and too many remnant areas have been needlessly burnt.
For local, volunteers and forest managers I have sympathy with their plight in the face of restrictions, staffing and resource issues that have disrupted previously successful fuel reduction regimes of low intensity fires lit with excellent timing derived from local experience and local knowledge. The difficulties of bush management regarding fire has been no doubt amplified by crazy local council planning, dead end roads and ‘sea changers’ scattered through the bush and out .along ridgelines.
A fire and vegetation history for each region would provide an essential basis for planning and using local knowledge – and it should be a widely available public document.
It is still essential to keep fires out of domestic water catchments and the Melbourne water supply catchment of Mountain Ash shows that older wetter forests are extremely resistant to fire.
The use of fire to preserve rainforests in northern Australia was common – but there is no way of burning a fire ‘to’ the rainforest or wet gully edge in most of southern Australia. I wouldn’t recommend going down a gully to hold the fire back – if you are going to leave it you leave the whole gully and let it get older and wetter.
There was some excellent work done after the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires by the old Vic forestry looking at what burnt and what did not – cypress hedges as flammable as all hell saved houses in the southwest because they cut the wind speed for long enough.
In Tasmania there was a study on the comparative flammability of a range of indigenous species wh9ich was amazing – some types of eucalypts that are not very flammable at all – E.ovata, swamp gum, for instance.
Finally I do not think it is a good idea to use forest fires as an excuse to up the harvest rate with pretty open ended definition of ‘salvage logging’, especially when good sawlogs are being chipped. (Eden hit 1 million tonnes last year for the first time from the 2003 salvage) and the replacement vegetation will use additional vast amounts of water.
Cheers Bob Mac