Reports in the media and from fire management colleagues indicate that the recent horrific bushfires in Greece have parallels in Australia and were predictable.
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.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
European media state that the bush and forest fires in Greece and Italy are arson by the maffia, because they want to construct buildings where the fire have raged . Where there is a bush or forest , it is not allowed. So they put it on fire….
Mafia connected to fires in Italy. Same in Greece:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,,2144554,00.html#article_continue
There is also the issue of climate change and drought, drying out the forests so that they burn much more easily, and the extremely strong winds. They cannot be directly attributed to AGW, but the prediction is that adverse weather conditions will increase.
I know quite a few Greek peoplpe, traditionally property was divided up amongst family so you might own 3 olive trees over here, 15 over there and so on. The grandparents and women picked the olives and they ran a few sheep or grew some veg inbetween.
All this has changed, they cant get anybody to pick the olives as the young are chasing careers and the old are too old. Traditional land management ways have been abandoned.
SJT, define a ‘mediterranean climate’ for me and tell me about the meltemi
Rog
every explanation is possible, except land management and AGW?
They say California is a “mediterranean climate”.
If that is so then a mediterraean climate is rarely freezing in the winter with most of the rain falling in Febuary/March/April, averaging 18 inches annually, which is insufficent to support agriculture without tapping into nearby snowpack or rivers for irrigation. The summer is long, and dry, from early May straight through to October. Forest fire season lasts from June to early November, with September being the most dangerous month due to high winds coupled with dried out vegetation.
Blaming the mafia, or terrorists, or arsonists or global warming is a cop-out. If the fuels are kept low by responsibly managed prescribed burning, the risk of summer fires getting out of hand is reduced.In heavy fuels, especially when dried by drought, fires rapidly become too intense for firefighters to tackle on the ground, and the water from aeroplanes evaporates before it reaches the flames. Result: bad bushfires. The fires in Victoria in 2003 and 2006/7 are living proof. Aborigines, American Indians, African bushmen and Greek peasants have know this for thousands of years. Modern western people think they know better….to their cost.
Yorkie
From more than forty years ago:
“The historic records from around the world leave no room to doubt that primitive herding and gathering peoples, as well as ancient farmers and herders, for a number of reasons, frequently and intentionally set fire to almost all the vegetation around them that would burn.”
Professor O. C. Stewart, p.117 in Proceedings of Second Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference, Tallahassee. March 1963.
They did the burn off at Wilson Prom, as prescribed by the regular crowd here. The Prom was so dried out from the drought, it went up like the Hindenburg. There’s more to it than just burning off, dessication also appears to be a factor.
Yes they did burn off Wilsons Prom, no doubt about that. SJT you said “there’s more to it than just burning off”, you bet there is. Such as senior bureaucrats having the will to do so, the provision of proper support and training for all staff involved not just ground crews, and mentoring from staff with real fire experience. These things are in addition to other essentials such as adequate equipment and experienced fire crews.
One off burn’s, such as the one you mentioned in Wilsons Prom, can and often do go astray, mostly due to inexperienced staff and/or poorly equiped staff, and a lack of LOCAL knowledge of the area to be burnt.
Off course desiccation is a factor, it is one reason why fuel reduction burns are not planned to occur in the summer. So the question is not should a fuel reduction burn be implemented but is the timing of the planned burn appropriate given the conditions,is the workforce adequately prepared to implement such a burn and more importantly are the senior bureaucrats willing to fully commit to fight such a fire once it has escaped its containment lines.
The escape of the fuel reduction fire on Wilsons Promontory was always a possibility and should have been planned for. There should have been a contingency plan in place that was realistic of the conditions that were there at that time, including the fuel load and the time since the last burn.
Time since the last burn was very important in that circumstance due to the limited application of fire as a management tool since the parks inception. Basically the fire crews lacked experience and their leadership possibly even more so.
It is either naive or mischievious to attempt to link the Wilsons Prom fire with the human tragedy that has occurred in Greece in such a manner.
>The escape of the fuel reduction fire on Wilsons Promontory was always a possibility and should have been planned for. There should have been a contingency plan in place…
You actually know that there wasn’t a contingency plan in place and there was no planning in case of an escape?
>It is either naive or mischievious to attempt to link the Wilsons Prom fire with the human tragedy that has occurred in Greece in such a manner.
Get over yourself Peter. SJT is quite possibly passing comment on the dry conditions that were in Victoria and the problems associated with fire management regimes, which have been brought up here previously. There were obviously dry conditions in Greece too, although the cause and effect of the two fires were vastly different. To suggest someone posting a comment is naive or mischievous where the loss of 63 lives is concerned is a pretty low call. Play the man not the ball.
Travis,
SJT attempted to link two very dissimilar events for whatever purpose, his comments were unneccessary and unhelpful given the tragedy that has occurred over there.
In regards to your comments re; contingency planning. If there was a plan it was inadequate. My post referred to the need for strong leadership and adequate planning. Clearly neither occurred at Wilsons Prom. If the conditions were iffy then the burn should have been postponed until more favourable conditions occurred. It really is that simple. Remember that there was not a culture of fuel reduction burning in the park management at that time. They were attempting to implement a long lost regime to improve the ecology of the park. I am not aware of what level of training they had or what level of experience they had but looking at it from my experience in fire management I would say without hesitation that there were deficiencies in both management and execution. Primarily in regards to the weather conditions at the time, understanding of forecast conditions and their response.
I stand by my comments that SJT’s remarks were either naive or mischievious.
Gosh, now it was the mafia?
What we saw was the logical consequence of a community deciding that it could implement discriminatory policies that load all the ecological burdens onto private forest owners while excluding them from all the benefits of future development.
It is a classic replication of the politics of exclusion and they all react with shock and surprise when those very same exclusionary policies result in a very small percentage of forest owners responding with a commensurate level of disregard for the community that has shafted them.
Arson is a standard response to gross injustice. It was for the “rick burners” of Georgian Britain, mostly landholders dispossesed by the enclosure laws. It was the same for African Americans during the Watts Riots in LA and numerous other minority responses to past examples of majority indifference.
“Burn baby, burn”, is an inevitable part of communities getting the environment their governance deserves.
The sad thing is that Bob Brown et al seriously think the remaining working forests in Tasmania would survive as they are if he got his way. Taking some of it always had a minimum of legitimacy, taking the lot is pure theft.