We have posted previously on how the loss of life in Victorian bushfires had been indirectly caused by the failure to conduct periodic and regular controlled burnoffs. Opposition from greenie groups and townies-cum-lately bushdwellers had stymied such bushfire mitigation strategies.
Miranda Devine updates us on progress being made by the appointed Royal Commission, and the political backlash that is already underway.
Fire prevention a burning issue
MIRANDA DEVINE
February 20, 2010
A year after the Black Saturday inferno, which killed 173 people, Victoria's bushfire royal commission is at last reaching the pointy end of its inquiry - the politically charged topic of prescribed burning and the effect of massive, unmanaged fuel loads on the fire's ferocity.
So yesterday, instead of relaxing in retirement, 79-year-old Athol Hodgson, Victoria's former chief fire officer, strapped on his armour to give evidence on the most important, and bitterly contentious, issue before the commission.
He is fortunate to have a sharp mind and keen memory, and the long experience of fire that makes him possibly the most knowledgeable person in the state when it comes to Victoria's prescribed burning program and its uniquely flammable bush.
He also has seared into his mind the personal nature of the threat. As a nine-year-old on his parents' dairy farm in north-east Victoria during the 1939 Black Friday fires, which killed 79 people and incinerated 2 million hectares, Hodgson woke in fright on the back veranda, where he slept with his big dog, to see flames advancing 500 metres away though the paddocks surrounding the house.
He remembers his father and eight older sisters fighting all night to beat out the fire with wet hessian bags. And the next morning, when they came home to milk the cows, he was sent to watch the embers for any signs of fire.
But, he told the commission yesterday, the lessons of 1939 have been forgotten and there has been a ''failure to provide a safe environment'' for Victorians for three decades. . . .
''And unless the government acknowledges present targets of 130,000 hectares [a year] are not based on science, but based probably on some Treasury restraint, and realises something needs to be done, we'll get more tragedies.
''It's the most important of all the issues facing the royal commission. If they don't do something about the cause of these fires, which is fuel, large numbers of people are going to die.''
He says the build-up of fuel before last February's fires was ''the worst in the history of white settlement''.
He urged the royal commission to recommend a trebling of prescribed burning to 365,000 hectares per year.
His strategy of setting a mandated target means the government will be held accountable for any future bushfire calamity due to excessive fuel build-up.
Contrary to mischievous claims by green groups, no one says prescribed burning prevents bushfires. But the evidence is incontrovertible that reducing ground fuel by controlled burning in the cooler months does reduce the speed and intensity of inevitable wildfires, and actually makes it possible to control them.
As the chief fire control officer of the Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands, Hodgson experienced first-hand the political interference in the mid '80s which eventually hobbled the prescribed burning program that had kept Victoria's flammable bush safe since the Stretton Royal Commission into the 1939 fires.
He praises Joan Kirner as the best minister he worked for, but she was as susceptible as any politician of the time to greenie and NIMBY complaints. She ordered a prescribed burn in south-east Victoria be stopped because smoke was affecting the autumn festival in the town of Bright, which, ironically, later almost was burnt out.
Another time, a prescribed burn was stopped because of fears for the long-footed potoroo. ''After that, the program collapsed - every prescribed burn that caused someone's eyes to water and a few that got out of hand became media news.''
As he told the commission: ''The pressure … placed on individuals required to ignite and manage fires was enormous. Prescribed burning is not an exact science and … always involves some risk … In the political climate prevailing through the 1990s, any outcome that made news was unacceptable, regardless of whether or not the objective of burning was met. Staff were exposed to criticism … Many doubted the support they would receive if 'their burn' became newsworthy.''
People ''doing their best on the ground said, 'Bugger this, it's not worth it'. The program collapsed [to the point that] one year only 40,000 hectares was burned for the whole state.''
The Hodgson recommendations, if adopted, will embarrass the Brumby government, which has tried to offload blame onto global warming and now fears the commission is out of control.
In an indication of how high the stakes are in an election year, Brumby's lawyer launched an extraordinary attack on the commission this month, claiming it was ''irresponsible and sensationalist, adversarial, pointless and damaging'' to suggest anything other than that authorities were ''simply overwhelmed by an extraordinary, unprecedented fire''.
Unmoved, the royal commission is taking seriously submissions on the need for more prescribed burning. This week counsel assisting, Jack Rush, QC, pointed out that no prescribed burns had been conducted around Kinglake, where 42 people died, since 1981.
Ever on guard against logic, the Wilderness Society, Victorian National Parks Association and Australian Conservation Foundation, which have a lawyer representing their interests at the commission, have mounted their usual campaign of disinformation and devious obstruction.
Their submission claims prescribed burning does little or nothing to slow fires during extreme conditions.
They fool no one except fools. And the royal commission doesn't appear to be manned by fools.
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