Someone needs to sort out the mess in the fire
management system, writes
Athol Hodgson.
GAVIN
McFadzean of the Wilderness Society ("Trees don't start fires",
Opinion 27/12 Melbourne AGE Newspaper) peddles fiction as fact, a mass of half-truths,
pseudo-scientific lies and emotional blackmail to suggest that anyone who criticises
the fire management of our national parks is anti-national park and
pro-logging.
Members
of Forest Fire Vic together have 400 years of combined experience in forest
management, fire control and research. We are a group of professional forest
practitioners and scientists formed after the disastrous 2002-03 Victorian
bushfires. We don't argue cases for or against any particular use of forests
for logging, grazing, parks or wilderness.
Forest
Fire Vic is interested only in vastly improving fire management, regardless of
what the forest is used for. We totally disagree with the contention that
active management equates with a more fire-prone forest.
McFadzean
relies on emotive and incorrect statements.
"Controlled burning can reduce fire hazard around towns
and urban centres, but may also create a fire time bomb in the bush."
If
controlled burning can reduce fire hazard in one place, it can do so elsewhere.
Years of experience and research have shown that hazard reduction by burning
makes fire fighting safer and easier.
There
is no evidence anywhere to support the contention that it creates a "time
bomb in the bush".
"We need to remember that (national parks) are huge
carbon sinks."
Forests,
not national parks, are carbon sinks, and only then if they are actively
growing. Some Victorian forests are huge carbon sources. There will be a
permanent loss of carbon to the atmosphere if these forests are not
regenerated.
"Their (forest ecosystems) response to regular hazard
reduction burns is for fire-tolerant plants to take over from fire resistant
plants …"
McFadzean does not explain
the difference between a fire-tolerant plant and a fire-resistant plant. His
implication is that fire-tolerant plants are more flammable and make the countryside
more fire prone. All credible scientific evidence is that as fuels age after
burning and build up to large quantities of litter, they become more hazardous
— even after the pioneering plants have died out.
"Management burns are routinely made in most
parks."
Not so, according to figures
published in successive reports by the Auditor-General, the Esplin report into
the 2003 bushfires, and Department of Sustainability and Environment reports.
These all show the abject failure of Parks Victoria and DSE to achieve annual
burning programs in any year, spanning two decades.
McFadzean cites the Esplin report on the 2002-2003
Victorian bushfires to argue that there are only about 10 days a year when
conditions are right for prescribed burning. That argument comes from a desktop
study done in the 1960s by Dr Malcolm Gill, who has no practical experience in
prescribed burning and was co-author of the Esplin report.
It
used Melbourne
weather data and the ridiculous notion that prescribed burning could not be
done at weekends, on public holidays and during the summer fire season.
DSE
debunked that notion and now finds more days to do prescribed burning than it
is able to take advantage of.
The
real reasons DSE has not achieved its burning programs were identified after
the fire in Wilsons
Promontory National
Park in 2005, in a second Esplin report.
Systemic
and cultural shortcomings and the separation of entities such as Parks Victoria
and Vic-Forests from DSE disrupted the management of fire fighting resources.
In
short, DSE is dysfunctional and, with too few permanent staff accredited for
fire-line work, is neither able to achieve its burning programs nor
aggressively attack multiple fires in their incipient stages successfully.
Until
someone sorts out the mess and makes the system work better, wilderness,
national park and other forest values are doomed to degradation.
McFadzean
also seems to know very little about the geography of Canberra or the fire that caused deaths and
damage in 2003.
"The Canberra
suburbs of Duffy and Curtin, which were razed in 2003, were surrounded by pine
plantations and grasslands. Pine plantations are managed forests with plenty of
roads and easy access, yet these forests created a firestorm".
The
suburbs were not surrounded by plantations and grasslands but had sections with
plantations, nature park and pasture on their western boundary.
A
forensic analysis of the fire shows that the intensity of fires burning in the
Namadgi and Brindabella national parks was so high that it created a tornado
that carried fire 14 kilometres across eaten-out pasture and plantation alike,
and the damage to the suburban houses was just as high where they were next to
eaten-out pasture as where they were close to the plantation.
Victorians
continue to pay too high a price for bushfires.
For
what result? Built assets lost when bushfires burn with the wind and saved when
the fires burn downhill or against the wind, water yields nearly halved for
decades, millions of birds and mammals dead, forest diversity reduced and
forests reduced from carbon sinks to carbon sources.
Melbourne
Water is showing the way by recognising the importance of early detection and
rapid, aggressive deployment of its highly skilled initial attack crews in
protecting Melbourne's
catchments.
Athol Hodgson is president of Forest Fire Victoria
Inc, and a former chief fire officer of Victoria.
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Your correspondent is now waiting for a Media Release from the Steve Bracks (pictured) Government shifting the blame for this onto the shoulders of the Kennett Government. Apparently, Victoria was a void before Kennett and he hasn't heard of John Cain and Joan Kirner.
