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The Black Saturday dragon

By Max Rheese - posted Monday, 8 February 2010


Victoria faces another February with many of the same underlying bleak fire tragedy conditions faced on Black Saturday: drought, hotter average temperatures and a further build-up of forest fuels from an unchanged prescribed-burning target.

Fire will be inevitable; the only possible variable will be if we experience a severe weather event such as the one that occurred on February 7 last year.

Much has happened on the fire suppression front, with the arrival of an expensive air tanker, improved communications, new command structures, new fire tankers and upgraded Incident Control Centres.

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Firebreaks have been constructed for some communities and Neighbourhood Safer Places for some others.

Planning for combating fires has been detailed and intense. Information and warnings for the community are plentiful, if not entirely understood.

Most of this action is necessary, but falls into the category of suppression and safety after fires are already raging.

Where we appear to have not yet learned the lessons of numerous and recurring bushfire tragedies is in the application of the axiom, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

The single greatest effect we as a community can have on the immutable fire triangle of temperature, ignition and fuel is the management of bushfire fuel. Yet the prescribed burn target for public land managers, as outlined in the government's budget papers, remains at 130,000ha a year, unchanged for the past five years.

This is despite a recommendation tabled in June 2008, seven months before Black Saturday, by a well-regarded government-led parliamentary inquiry into bushfires, for a trebling of prescribed burning to 385,000ha.

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Adoption of this target would see 95 per cent of public land untouched by prescribed burning in any one year. The all-party inquiry took the advice given in evidence by departmental officers responsible for fire management that this was the level of management required to enable some hope of reasonable bushfire control in Victoria's highly flammable forests.

Nobody is under the illusion that increasing the amount of prescribed burning will prevent bushfires, but a substantial and growing volume of research shows unequivocally that reducing the fuel available by cool burning in autumn or spring reduces the speed and intensity of inevitable fires, thereby enabling control.

This is the best management tool we can give land managers if we wish to protect our precious biodiversity and water yield in all catchments from enormous damage by intense conflagrations such as Black Saturday.

The tragedy is the state government has not given public land managers the resources or funding, let alone the political commitment, to enable fire management to become the cornerstone of public land management, as recommended by the Stretton royal commission seven decades ago.

Again, the 2009 budget papers show an 11 per cent decline in the fire prevention budget from two years ago. Project firefighters employed by the government, after the worst natural disaster in the nation's history, have risen from 668 to 703. Thirty-five extra firefighters over five departmental fire regions, not enough to man two extra tankers per region. This is unlikely to have a significant effect on fire suppression or pre-season fire prevention works for which they are employed.

The government has stated, in reply to correspondence pleading for adoption of the parliamentary inquiry recommendations, that it will wait until the final report of the royal commission before deciding on changes to prescribed burning. This in effect means no increased action on accumulation of fuel loads on seven million hectares of public land until autumn 2011, two years after the inferno that cost us 173 of our neighbours, 450,000ha of incinerated environment and $1 billion in Victorian taxpayer funds for suppression and recovery.

It is estimated that trebling our prescribed burning, as recommended, would cost $31 million a year.

The focus for the past decade, where we have suffered three mega-fires that have incinerated three million hectares of mostly public land, has been suppression and recovery.

We need to consider the two choices available to us if we are to intelligently face the reality of bushfire in the Victorian landscape. One is to protect people and the environment through a return to a realistic program of bushfire fuel reduction via benign prescribed burning, as practised in the early 1980s, the other is to wait for the next inferno to repeat the lessons we should have learned in 2003, 2007 and 2009.

The weather and the forest fuel will not wait long for the government to make up its mind on whether it makes fire management, in the words of Leonard Stretton, "the paramount concern of the forest manager" or we continue along the environmentally destructive and societally traumatic path of the last decade.

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First published in The Australian February 5, 2010.



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About the Author

Max Rheese is the Executive Director of the Australian Environment Foundation.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Max Rheese

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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