71 Bushfire (Wildfire) inquiry covers up Fuel Reduction failure

Bushfire (Wildfire) inquiry covers up Fuel Reduction failure

(1) Bushfire inquiry covers up fuel reduction failure
(2) Bushfires royal commission ignores fuel reduction burns
(3) "Saving" forests, by converting them to National Parks, leads to Bushfires (Wildfires)
(4) Greens oppose prescribed burning (fuel reduction burning)
(5) Victorian Greens oppose Firebreaks (2007)
(6) Tribunal orders farmer to replant firebreak
(7) Greens should learn Fuel Reduction from Aboriginal practice

(1) Bushfire inquiry covers up fuel reduction failure

From: CEC Media Release <mediareleases@cecaust.com.au> Date: 25.08.2009 09:41 PM

"With the interim report from the Bushfires Royal Commission now out, the most stark revelations are those which are not stated," CEC Leader Craig Isherwood said today.

Back in February, Mr Isherwood said that Victoria doesn’t need a Royal Commission, as it has had two Royal Commissions before, by Judge Stretton, into the Victorian bushfire disasters of 1939 and 1944, and the result was crystal clear: the bushfire disasters then, as now, were caused by what the Judge called "ridiculously inadequate" prescribed burning of the forests, and he mandated "fire prevention must be the paramount consideration of the forester".

"Guess what was left out of this interim report?" Mr Isherwood asked.

He restated, "For forty years, fuel reduction burning was practiced as a scientific forestry management measure, until the intervention of, first, radical greenies in the Cain/Kirner Labor Government, and then, radical economic rationalists in the Kennett Government.

"Environmental concerns for ‘biodiversity’ etc. were increasingly cited to stop fuel reduction burns in the Cain/Kirner years, and then Kennett slashed the Department’s budget and staff, and gutted its ability to do prescribed burns.

"In 1992 the Auditor-General found that the Department of Conservation and Environment [now Sustainability and Environment] had cut expenditure on fire prevention by 23 per cent over five years, and in 2003 the Auditor-General found that the amount of prescribed burning had never met the Department’s targets."

Mr Isherwood continued, "As I stated in February, prescribed burning doesn’t stop bushfires, but it dramatically reduces the intensity of the type of wildfires that erupt on extreme fire danger days like Black Saturday."

He pointed out that last December, two months before the Black Saturday bushfire disaster, the Brumby government had already rejected the idea of tripling the area of prescribed burning from 130,000 to 385,000, stating that "the government supports a move away from focusing on hectare-based targets, which may lead to inappropriate planned burning programs."

(2) Bushfires royal commission ignores fuel reduction burns
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25949716-5000117,00.html

Gaping black hole in fire report

Andrew Bolt

August 19, 2009 12:00am

THIS week's interim report by the bushfires royal commission ignores the one thing most people writing to it said would save lives.

Not one of its 51 recommendations mentions fuel reduction burns.

That means we go into our next fire season, in just 70 days, without a word from this inquiry on what is probably our best hope of saving bush people from another inferno.

This inquiry admits it received 485 submissions from fire experts, foresters, residents and the plain frightened asking it to consider whether we do enough burning to rob fires of fuel.

Nothing was mentioned more often in submissions - not better warnings, fire refuges, the stay-or-go policy or anything else the commission's report discusses, often with too little effective change to recommend.

(The more trivial recommendations: let's call evacuations "relocations"; let's stress, as if it were new, that our first duty is to save lives; let's have a new scale of fire warnings with a category worse than "extreme".)

It's astonishing that the commission should say its recommendations on fuel reduction burns, on the other hand, must wait until next year. In fact, it's put them below the green favourite of "climate change" on its to-do list.

Three things make this odd.

First, fire reduction burns clearly save lives. A brutal question: which parts of our forests are at least risk of burning this season? Answer: the bits burned out last summer.

Second, fuel reduction burns have been repeatedly identified by past fire inquiries as not just a life-saving strategy, but one we too often neglect, especially in these green days.

Here's just some of the inquiries that warned we just hadn't done enough burns: the 1939 royal commission into Black Friday; the 1984 Ash Wednesday inquiry; the 1992 auditor-general's report; the 1994 CSIRO report on fire management; the inquiry into our 2002-03 fires; the 2003 report for Nillumbik residents on Kinglake; and the 2008 report by State Parliament's environment and natural resources committee, which called for a tripling of reduction burns.

In fact, this royal commission is unique in presenting a report - albeit an interim one - that does not mention fuel reduction burns.

And here's the third reason it should: it was clear too few such burns were done by the Department of Sustainability and the Environment in particular, especially in the areas that were worst hit on Black Saturday.

Now Christine Fyffe, a member of that environment and natural resources committee, warns we still may not have learned the lesson.

Why hasn't the Mt Donna Buang area had burns, she asked in Parliament last week. Without them, the townships of Warburton, Warburton East, McMahons Creek, Millgrove, Wesburn, Gilderoy, Gladysdale, Hoddles Creek, Powelltown, Gruyere and places in between were in danger.

Fyffe may well be wrong . . . or right. The royal commission could have settled this urgent question.

But for its answer we must now wait until after this fire season, which Premier John Brumby warns could be even worse than the last.

(3) "Saving" forests, by converting them to National Parks, leads to Bushfires (Wildfires)

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/fire-prevention-on-backburner-20090819-eqht.html

Fire prevention on backburner

Date: August 20 2009

Miranda Devine

You would have thought, with less than 10 weeks until the bushfire season, this week's Victorian bushfires royal commission interim report might have mentioned the most frequently raised concern in submissions, the one which experts say determines whether a manageable blaze becomes an inferno: the availability of fuel.

But no. Not one of the report's 51 recommendations deals with prescribed or controlled burning or any means of fuel reduction which reduces the intensity of a fire and makes firefighting easier, or even possible.

That is despite the fact 485 of more than 1200 submissions concern fuel reduction.

The commission, which has spent four months investigating the February 7 fires which killed 173 people, claims to have first dealt with issues relevant to this bushfire season and will address long-term changes before handing down its final report in July. But in a press release flagging future areas of interest, the commission makes no mention of fuel reduction, just building standards, bunkers, the electricity industry, and "a range of other matters".

The Orwellian language of the interim report, which rebadges "evacuation" as "relocation", hardly engenders confidence that people will be any safer in bushfire seasons to come.

To be fair, it may be that the commission is not copping out but buying time before tackling the controversial problem of fuel reduction and management of public land.

There is no shortage of insightful material in the submissions waiting to be addressed. The submission from the Institute of Foresters of Australia, for instance, is crisp, clear, informative and unemotional.

It charts the evolution of the "deeply unsatisfactory" bushfire situation in Victoria, especially over the past decade when there has been "a political focus on expanding national parks and conservation reserves" - now 52 per cent of Victoria's public lands.

There has been "a profound change in management focus to meet more passive conservation aims [leading] to a loss of fire management expertise, greater restrictions to public access due to track closures and declining levels of maintenance, and a demonstrable reduction in the broadscale use of prescribed fire as a management tool to mitigate the impact of summer bushfires.

"This combination of factors has allowed forest fuels to accumulate to an extent that has raised the intensity of summer bushfires and increasingly forced a greater reliance on emergency fire-fighting," the institute says.

"This has occurred at a time when there has been an increasing development of housing in bushfire-prone areas both making the use of prescribed burning more difficult on adjacent public lands…"

These professional foresters not only have university training in bushfire behaviour, fire suppression and prevention, and land use planning, but every day they are in the field working in forest, parks and plantation management roles, fighting fires and using prescribed burning to mitigate fire. As they put it: "We know the business, from the sharp end."

Their submission points out that south-east Australia's flammable native forests and climate make it one of the most fire-prone areas in the world. Bushfires are inevitable, with "high-intensity conflagrations every few years when dry fuels and rainfall deficits combine with days of high temperature and wind. This has been the case throughout our recorded history."

Refusing to perform adequate controlled burning in fire-prone landscapes "inevitably results in heavy fuel accumulations that consign forests to a regime of periodic large, high intensity fire."

The foresters trace the history of fire politics from the 1920s when European ideas started subverting the Australian forestry practice of regularly using fire to "clean up" the forest floor and maintain a light fuel load as the "key to controlling bushfires".

Controlled burning during this period was haphazard. Then in 1939 came the Black Friday inferno which killed 71 Victorians.

Paradoxically, say the foresters, "these fires heralded the beginning of a new era of forest fire management" after the Stretton royal commission placing the blame squarely on "the hand of man", on poor land management and inadequate controlled burning.

Stretton's legacy was that Australian forestry moved to controlled burning rather than bushfire suppression to protect its forests. Foresters were responsible for almost all the state's forests and there was a "healthy balance between expenditure on fire prevention activities in the off season against that spent on summer bushfire suppression".

But the 1982 election of the Cain government in Victoria "signalled the start of an enduring period of profound change which continues today".

Successive state governments "largely embraced the environmentalists' view that Victoria's forests needed to be 'saved' and that this would be achieved simply by changing public land tenure from state forest to national park".

National Parks in Victoria increased by almost 30 per cent from 1998 to 2008. "A substantial part of this expansion has had little or no rational conservation-based foundation, and has been undertaken simply to serve a political need to win the support of 'green' voters."

The upshot is that fire mitigation activities, such as controlled fuel reduction burning, have been neglected in favour of "funding towards an emergency bushfire suppression model that we believe will always fail to justify its huge expense".

Suppression is nigh on impossible with high intensity fires "that are a direct consequence of inadequate fire prevention activities which over many years have allowed forest fuels to accumulate to high levels in much of the forest estate".

This week's interim report has drawn criticism because it didn't identify scapegoats to crucify. Clearly mistakes were made that terrible day, but the fires were out of control, a perfect storm of weather and fuel loads pushing them at a speed and intensity that could not be stopped.

It was an impossible situation that should have been avoided. Prevention is always better than cure.

devinemiranda@hotmail.com

Comment (Peter M.):

Miranda's argument that "Saving" forests, by converting them to National Parks, leads to Bushfires, is spot-on.

Another point is that State Forests used to issue Grazing Leases, whereby farmers placed cattle & horses in the forest to keep undergrowth down. Greens got them evicted.

Her column is not run in The (Melbourne) Age, where it is most needed.

(4) Greens oppose prescribed burning (fuel reduction burning)

This burning issue of life and death

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/this-burning-issue-of-life-and-death-20090218-8bee.html

MIRANDA DEVINE

February 19, 2009

One of the biggest furphies in the supercharged debate in the wake of Victoria's bushfires is the claim by green groups that they are great supporters of hazard reduction burning.

Also known as prescribed burning, this scientific regime creates a mosaic of lightly burned land at regular intervals of five to seven years, thus reducing surface fuel loads by varying amounts within the mosaic.

This reduction of fuel loads is expensive, but Australia's pre-eminent bushfire researchers, such as the CSIRO's Phil Cheney and Monash University's David Packam, say it has been proven to reduce the power and intensity of fire. Every bushfire inquiry since the 1939 Stretton royal commission has recommended increased prescribed burning to mitigate the effects of inevitable wildfire.

It is a matter of public record that green groups have long opposed such systematic prescribed burning, as is evident in their submissions to bushfire inquiries from as far back as 1992. They complain of a threat to biodiversity, including to fungi, from "frequent burning" regimes and urge resources be spent on water bombers and early detection, as well as on stopping climate change - good luck with that.

Yet last week, Jonathan La Nauze of Friends of the Earth, Melbourne, in a letter to this newspaper claimed: "…not one Australian environmental organisation is opposed to prescribed burning … Environment groups are engaged in a sophisticated debate about where and how prescribed burning can be most effective."

Yes, it's sophisticated, all right. It just depends how you define "prescribed burning".

On the other side of the country, one Peter Robertson, the West Australian co-ordinator of the Wilderness Society, was singing from a different song sheet. His letter last week to The West Australian stated: "Experience and risk analysis show that repeatedly burning tens of thousands of hectares of remote bushland and forest will do little to address the threat of bushfires to human communities … It would be a huge mistake if the community was led to believe that a massive, expensive and environmentally destructive prescribed burning program was going to protect them when it could make matters worse." Robertson is no lone ranger among greens in opposition to prescribed burning.

The WA Forest Alliance, for instance, lodged a submission to the NSW parliamentary inquiry into the 2001-02 bushfires, claiming: "Frequent fires have a disastrous effect on many species of flora and fauna and their habitat structure." WWF Australia's submission claimed: "Inappropriate fire hazard regimes can damage biodiversity leading to the loss of native species, communities and ecosystems."

The NSW Greens state on their website as part of their bushfire risk management policy: "There is an urgent need to correct the common misconception that responsible fire management always involves burning or clearing to reduce moderate and high fuel loads…"

In 2003, lightning strikes in fuel-rich national parks in NSW and the ACT sparked bushfires which swept into Canberra, killing four people.

Days later, the NSW Nature Conservation Council's then chairman, Rob Pallin, described calls for increased prescribed burning as "futile" and a "knee-jerk reaction". "People who claim that hazard reduction burning is a cure-all for bushfire risk are either fooling themselves or deliberately trying to fool the public." It is another clever tactic of those who oppose broadscale prescribed burning to claim that it is not a "cure-all" for bushfire risk. No one has ever claimed it is.

As Cheney repeatedly has said, wildfires will occur, but prescribed burning reduces the intensity of a fire burning "under any set of meteorological conditions", and it reduces the spread of the fire, allowing firefighters to construct effective control lines.

And yet there have been recent moves to have controlled burning listed as a "key threatening process" under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Such a submission has reportedly been received by the Threatened Species Scientific Committee.

In NSW, already, the Department of Environment and Conservation has listed "too frequent fire" as a "key threatening process to biodiversity".

But the real threatening process is the holocaust we have just seen in Victoria.

Last week angry fire survivors in Victoria pointed the finger at local authorities who prevented clearing of vegetation. At a public meeting in Arthurs Creek, Warwick Spooner, who lost his mother and brother in the Strathewen fire, stood up criticise the Nillumbik council.

"We've lost two people in my family because you dickheads won't cut trees down." Then of course, there is Liam Sheahan, the Reedy Creek home owner whose house is the only one in a two-kilometre area which survived the fires. In 2004 he was fined $50,000 for removing 247 trees around his hilltop house to protect it from fire. His two-year court battle against the Mitchell Shire Council cost him $50,000 in legal fees.

It is a rich irony that Slidders Lawyers last week launched a class action on behalf of fire victims at Kinglake, against the Singapore-owned electricity company SP AusNet, alleging the fire was caused by a fallen power line.

After all, it was only in 2001 that Transgrid bulldozed a 60-metre wide firebreak under its high-voltage lines in the Snowy Mountains. For that it was prosecuted by four government agencies, blasted for "environmental vandalism" by the then NSW premier Bob Carr, and fined $500,000.

Two years later, during the disastrous firestorm that engulfed the mountains, the offending firebreak became the only safe haven for kangaroos and workers constructing a fire trail. The sad truth of such holocausts is that the environmental toll ends up worse than the most vigorous prescribed burning regime ever could be.

Victoria's bushfires have spewed millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - more than a third of Australia's entire output for a year, according to Sydney University's Professor Mark Adams.

No doubt the royal commission will recommend, like previous inquiries, that prescribed burning should be increased. After so many deaths will anyone listen this time?

devinemiranda@hotmail.com

(5) Victorian Greens oppose Firebreaks (2007)

http://www.theage.com.au/news/NATIONAL/Firebreaks-pretty-useless-green-groups/2007/10/22/1192940974872.html

Firebreaks pretty useless: green groups

October 22, 2007 - 5:09PM

Environmental campaigners are calling for more independent scientific research to determine the best solutions for protecting Victoria's forests from bushfires.

In the aftermath of last summer's devastating bushfires that destroyed almost 1.2 million hectares across Victoria - the state government authorised a 600km network of fire breaks to protect water catchment areas and create better access for firefighters.

But the Wilderness Society is calling for a "dramatic rethinking" of current fire management policies, saying the fire breaks - including some up to one kilometre wide - amount to the "indiscriminate" and unnecessary destruction of pristine wilderness areas.

"Fire breaks of up to one kilometre wide - it's pretty extraordinary given the jury is still out on how effective fire breaks are," the Wilderness Society's Victorian campaigns manager Gavan McFadzean told AAP.

"The capacity for fires to jump large distances means many breaks are pretty useless, even the extremely wide ones.

"We would prefer to see more expenditure and investment in infrastructure - for example, bring in more water-bombing helicopters - and a quicker response to fire outbreaks.

"Fire breaks and fuel reduction measures around populated areas is great for protecting people and properties and local communities but large-scale fire reduction measures in remote areas is very unnecessary and quite indiscriminate."

More than 1,000 bushfires blackened much of the state over a harrowing 69 days last summer, with communities in the state's north and east the worst affected.

The disastrous fire season prompted the state government to launch a parliamentary inquiry to examine the impact of public land management practices on the frequency and intensity of bushfires.

The inquiry's brief also included examining the effectiveness of prescribed burns and permanent fire breaks, the provision of large water access points on crown land and the impact of climate change and land use on bushfires.

Mr McFadzean said bulldozing huge tracts of land to create fire breaks in remote areas also served to further the interest of the commercial logging industry.

"You cannot treat Victoria's forests as a single, homogenous landscape - different approaches are needed for different areas.

"The whole issue needs more impartial scientific research on the different types of forest that require fire management, rather than being treated as a single homogenous area," he said.

"We'd also like to see an end to logging, which destroys wetter old growth forests and replaces it with young, dry and more fire-prone regrowth over vast areas."

Comment was being sought from the government's Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE).

© 2007 AAP

(6) Tribunal orders farmer to replant firebreak

Padraic Murphy

August 22, 2009 12:00am

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25963623-5018723,00.html

A LAND owner's attempt to protect his neighbours from bushfires has backfired - he has been ordered to replant land he cleared.

Despite overwhelming support from residents of the small Gippsland community of Langsborough, which narrowly escaped the Black Saturday fires, Jo Van Gaal has lost an 18-month battle with Wellington Shire Council.

It objected to him clearing parts of his 21ha block east of Wilsons Promontory.

Mr Van Gaal said he was initially instructed to clear the land by the council's fire prevention officers, so he was shocked to receive a $550 fine in early 2007.

The land - until recently a farm with 80 horses and 560 cattle - was mostly bottle-brush scrub with few mature trees, he said.

"There are 30 or so houses at Langsborough that will go if a fire ever gets through there," he said.

"I wanted to retire on that land and run a few horses and cattle. Now they seem to be dictating what I can do with it."

VCAT ordered the replanting of about 8ha even though it acknowledged the land had been used as a dump by locals for many years.

It said: "We acknowledge that residents of Langsborough would prefer the whole of this land to function as a semi-cleared fire break.

"However, we are not convinced this would necessarily be a guarantee of protection for the township from fire and it ignores the environmental values of the vegetation.

"We acknowledge the public-spirited motives for Mr Van Gaal's actions, but cannot condone them by ignoring his breach of the planning scheme or waiving any requirement for rehabilitation to be undertaken."

Langsborough resident Anne Collins said the community was very concerned by the decision. The land was overgrown and a fire hazard.

The battle to clear the land comes as Federal MP Fran Bailey slammed the interim report from the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission for failing to address the issue of fuel reduction.

"People are bewildered and angry about that," said Ms Bailey, whose electorate of McEwan was home to most of the 173 people who died on Black Saturday.

(7) Greens should learn Fuel Reduction from Aboriginal practice

http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/bush-fuel-loads-must-be-reduced-expert-20090209-81vn.html

Bush fuel loads must be reduced: expert
Danny Rose
February 9, 2009

Three factors combine to create a bushfire crisis and authorities have not done enough to reduce the one they can control, a Melbourne-based researcher says.

David Packham, a Research Fellow at Monash University, says the weekend's devastation across Victoria could have been reduced had a proper regime of fuel reduction burns been in place.

He says a bushfire crisis also needs hot and dry windy weather plus an ignition source such as accident, lightning strike or arson - areas where authorities could exercise little control.

"The mismanagement of the south-eastern forests of Australia over the last 30 or 40 years by excluding prescribed burning and fuel management has lead to the highest fuel concentrations we have ever had in human occupation," he says.

"The state has never been as dangerous as what it is now and this has been quite obvious for some time."

Mr Packham has specialised in bushfire research and meteorology for more than 50 years, and he is attached to the university's Climatology Group.

"There has been a total lack of willingness to instigate a proper fuel reduction management program based on the skills and understanding of indigenous people who after all, for tens of thousands of years, were the stewards of our environment," he also says.

"We have thumbed our noses at what these people did and knew and we just can't keep on doing it."

In terms of the weather conditions on the weekend, Mr Packham said the Bureau of Meteorology had very accurately forecast the extreme conditions that occurred.

"Last Saturday we had the most intense fire weather conditions we have had in forecast history with the exception of cyclone Alby in the late 1970s in Western Australia which, if you believe, was even worse," he says.

© 2009 AAP