There are out-of-control fires burning across northern Victoria, Australia, with more than 170,000 hectares consumed so far. There is an update in today's The Age and also a photo gallery which can be accessed from the main page.
Yesterday I phoned Max Rheese a friend and colleague from Benalla. He said he was OK and that he would send me a note for the blog about the fires:
"Seven days ago, on Friday December 1, I relaxed in the family room of my home in Benalla in North East Victoria and watched the first of the summer thunderstorms pass overhead. I witnessed the lightning strike in the nearby ranges that started the first of fifty fires to be ignited by that thunderstorm. A week later I sit in the same room and cannot see more than 200 metres into the paddocks because of the thick smoke that has enveloped Benalla from the still burning fires.
A total of 150,000 hectares of mainly native forest has been burnt in the past week. Tomorrow the forecast temperature is 39 degrees with northerly winds and dire predictions of impending disaster by everyone from Premier Bracks to the local hairdresser. Speculation of 600,000 hectares being burnt by the end of next week are reported.
A distinct feeling of déjà vu pervades, as North East Victoria went through the same sort of event in the Alpine fires of 2003 where 1.1 million hectares of mainly public land was burnt in 59 days of inferno that was unequalled, in area burnt, since Black Friday in January 1939.
It is difficult to comprehend for many people that we should be facing a potential holocaust this summer after the very recent disastrous fires of 2003. Ample evidence was presented at a number of inquiries into the 2003 fires that a lack of prescribed burning over a twenty year period had increased the fuel load in many areas of the high country of Victoria.
Athol Hodgson, a former chief fire officer for the then Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands presented submissions to the inquiries that followed the 2003 fires detailing the lack of prescribed burning over the previous two decades. This was not disputed.
The following is an extract of a paper that Hodgson delivered to The Eureka Forum in Ballarat in 2004:
Another top priority is to restore prescribed burning programs in forests. Immediately after the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983 the Government injected $1 million extra into the programs effectively doubling the money available for field staff to do the work. Yet the programs crashed. In 1992 the Auditor General found that the Department of Conservation and Environment had failed to achieve its planned fuel-reduction targets in three consecutive seasons and that those areas the Department identified as warranting the highest level of protection to human life, property and public assets received the lowest level of protection. And in 2003 the Auditor General found that since 1994, fuel reduction burning has never met the Department's planning and operational fuel-reduction targets. In allowing that to happen, the Department ignored the truism heralded by Judge Stretton in 1939, repeated by Sir Esler Hamilton Barber in 1977 and further reinforced by the Miller Report on the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983, that fire prevention must be the paramount consideration of the forest manager.
The Government and the Department must lift their game. They must do so, not only in places where the priority is to protect life and assets. Those places are a very small proportion of the forest estate and to concentrate on them to the exclusion of the rest of the forests will lead inevitably to more feral fires. Prescribed burning has been done successfully in the past on broad areas to create forest diversity and reduce the damaging effects of wildfires. The practice had little community and no political support from the mid-1980's until 2003 and was the reason why fuel management programs crashed in that era. That support must be won and the practice reinstated in our forests in a safe way.
…"that fire prevention must be the paramount consideration of the forest manager".
This is not rocket science, but we as a community have lost the plot. We are so busy embracing the notion of protecting our forests that we cannot see the forest for the trees.
For goodness sake! How many times do we have to go through this before we get it right?
Figures supplied by the Department of Sustainability and Environment [responsible for fire management on public land] to the Auditor General show that 127,000 hectares were burnt in 2004 - 2005 in prescribed burns. This very mediocre total was one year after the disastrous Alpine fires of 2003. This is well below the 10 year average for burns of 200,000 hectares and even further behind the high points of prescribed burning in the 1980's where totals of upto 450,000 were burnt one year and over 300,000 hectares were burnt in several other years.
We need to stop the blame game, encourage the Victorian government to adopt a proper scientific regime of sufficient prescribed burning that will deliver confidence in the management of native forests to lessen the impacts of fires in years of severe drought such as this year.
Governments and the community must accept that there is inherent risk in prescribed burning and that occassionally a burn will escape. To not accept this risk and to be overly prescriptive with protocols for burning operations will result in the situation that country Victorians will face this weekend; multiple uncontrolled wildfires in areas that have not had fuel reduction burns for many years.
Max Rheese
Executive Director, Australian Environment Foundation "
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My thoughts are with the communities in northern Victoria and also the communities of forest animals.
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Quite true Kersten,
As the film "The Madness of George III" showed, it is often entirely the wrong people who get promoted, or otherwise rewarded. Why not send a list of names to the Governor-General, and suggest the timber workers get some award?
Everyone fighting the fires throughout Australia are heroes, however, it is disappointing that timber workers who are vilified by the media, harrassed by the great unwashed and looked down upon by people who love timber products are not given due recognition for their efforts in fighting the fires. In Victoria it is estimated that over $30 million of timber workers equipment is on the front line fighting the fires. Like others these men have not been home for two weeks leaving behind families to worry about their safety. Unfortunately in a cruel twist of fate Peter McConacy a contractor who prior to the fires was salvage logging the forests destroyed by the 2003 fires has had his equipment go up in flames. Peter along with 6 of his employees were off fighting fires in other areas when the winds changed and his equipment on the outskirts of Mt. Beauty was destroyed. Is it too much for those that have opposed these heroes for years to say thankyou, to recognise them for their hard work and dedication to saving rural communities? Finally people should think if there is no timber workers, where will the $30 million of equipment come from and who will have the skills to operate the machinery in dense forests?
Gavin,
We understand that the availability of communication networks in rural regions seems to be a major problem in Australia. The Fire Watch System is designed to work with any communication technology like:
Telephone line and mobile phones, radios, point to point, satellite, microwave.
From whom can we get more detailed information about exesting communication systems used today. Please send us the contacts we then will work out a communication concept.
Since Fire Watch is not using video life streams but simply data packages, a data rate of 128 kb is adequate for a reliable transfer of Fire Watch Information.
Regards
Werner: "Sentinel" is our main bushfire mapping tool and it is used by all national and state authorities for updates on outbreaks.
"Sentinel currently obtains data from the NASA Earth Observation Satellites Terra and Aqua. Plans are well advanced to include data from other satellites in the near future"
http://sentinel.ga.gov.au/acres/sentinel/about.shtml
Return to the Sentinel home page, the map is so easy to use. Today there are many fires still burning around the Victorian town, Mansfield.
To the east of Mansfield in the current bushfire operational areas there are very few roads or ground based communication networks. Crews are hampered by difficult terrain and I guess are most likely to be restricted to working just around the few settlements.
Other state based systems report on direct observations via various communications networks such as radios and mobile phones
Yes Gavin,
if the sky is blanketed by smoke it's already too late. Fire Watch is a system that is monitoring on realtime an area where nothing happens. It however will spot a place where smoke is produced and will report. The operator will instantly zoom in on that area and further analize the situation before deciding to send out an alarm.
If you talk about blanketed skies the dynamics of fire have for some time already taken over.
I tried to transmit the understanding that Fire Watch is a tactical insturment to prevent explicitely such dynamics and fight a fire in its very beginning stage. It first has to be detected and localized, then reported and extinguished when still controllable.
The discussion should in my view concentrate on how such fires can be prevented firsthand. Among the practicle and known solutions of any Fire Prevention Management the Fire Watch System being a network of sensor units monitoring rural bushland and forest where normally nothing happens, will supply that missing edge of information detecting a spot where a fire just is to start!
Wouldn't it be more than worthwhile to look deeper into this technology?
You are right that the stream of data has to be transported in some way. We do have solutions to that problem which can be discussed and which are well known among the specialists. Anyway the cost of wildland devastated by fire and the loss of life is manyfold higher than the infrastructure that helps prevent such fires.
Gavin I did not get your point about microwave and "please note these people use Sentinel for tracking and so do I.."
In the Rocky Mountains the system detected in a distance of approx 40 km in a hilly forested area a small smoke flag rising through trees straight into the sky and did however not send out an alert. The operator detected the spot on his monitor, zoomed in to verify - it was a small indian fire with the lack of dynamics and later checks showed it was a man controlled fire.