Bush Fires in Victoria

There have been bush fires in Victoria and my wife's parents' house was under threat of fire. We took a few says off to stay with them and help with fire watch. In the end the fire didn't get close, but it was touch and go with the wind. All we got was a lot of smoke. You can see some pictures of fires in the immediate area: From the ABC and from ruralpress.

It looks like the fire situation is completely resolved now, as we've had several days of rain. This is quite a relief, as these things can smoulder on and on for weeks, waiting for strong winds to start them back up, if nothing puts them out.

I'm sure there are writings on this subject by people far more knowledgable than I, but it seemed that the fire services did a great job and prevented the fires from becoming much worse than they might have done. However, there were places where they simply couldn't access the fires to contain them, and there's little we can do about that. Something that could be fixed is the recurring issue of poor precautions by land owners and tennants that has made some things worse than they needed to be.

Pine Plantations near towns and coal mines are not a good idea

The problem around Yallourn North seems to have been aggravated by pine plantations. I used to live in Canberra, and pine plantations there resulted in a disaster. I think it should be obvious to anyone that pine plantations should never approach any significant urban center, or other high-risk area.

Yallourn North is the site of a large open cut coal mine, and as such in the past the government prevented plantations from going anywhere near it. It would be a grim situation if the coal mine caught fire. The plantation exclusion made sense when they first applied it, and it makes sense now. There isn't such a shortage of space in Australia to make it necessary to put commercial plantations right up against towns, or coal mines. The only way I can see this happened in the first place was that corrupt behaviour and the influence of pressure groups overruled common sense.

These badly placed plantations end up costing the tax payer millions because of the damage they do. It's a risk out of proportion to their actual value to the economy. They could never have been justified on economic grounds, not when you do the math. The fact that they were prevented in the past speaks volumes. What changed? You'd think we'd learn something from the destruction in Canberra, but apparently not.

Inadequate fire breaks - stronger regulation needed?

I used to do a lot of cycling in the Canberra plantation areas, and one thing that always struck me was that the fire breaks were not really wide enough, and not kept clear enough. By introducing stronger regulations for more realistic fire breaks we might significantly ease the pressure on fire crews when bad weather strikes. Again, the culprits are the plantation owners. It's in their own best interests to contain fires, they should be the experts on it, and yet they lose thousands of hectares year on year. It's almost as if they like paying gigantic insurance premiums. Is there some kind of fiddle going on here? Surely the cost of employing more people to maintain fire trails would be worth it?

posted by Peter Wake @ 2:51 am