Gippsland fires prompt memories for Ewan
For veteran firefighter Ewan Waller this year’s fires in Gippsland have prompted both memories of Black Saturday and thoughts on bushfire policy.
He remembers the nauseating feeling walking over the charred remains of countless birds.
“Such high intensity fires are so destructive of all values, particularly conservation values. Just the death of millions of birds and animals, insects, micro-biology – the whole works. The loss of carbon is immense, destruction of soil structure, the physical damage to streams and catchments – anyway you look at it,” he said.
One estimate of the megafire that burnt 2.5 million hectares of the Kosciusko National Park in 2003-04 was 370 million birds, mammals and reptiles killed over 60 days.
Ewan, Victoria’s former chief fire officer with more than 40 years’ experience as a forester, is now a consultant, living near Dargo. He praised Victoria’s firefighting. “Forest Fire Management Victoria is doing a really good job on suppression”,” he said, but the biggest issue was burning - fuel management.
“There’s just not enough research going into the damage of the big fires,” he said. With planned burns, the lighting pattern was so critical – the time of the year and managing the intensity of the burn. “We should burn at night and far more into winter, and selectively – real mosaic burning. Ideally, there should be a mix of burnt and unburnt, with repeated burning.”
“You can do it now with aircraft, coming back every three years or so. Part of the solution – Tasmania is going this way – is to have a select group that lead and do the burning.”
“The unit area now is too small, particularly in the back country. It’s got to be tens of thousands of hectares. Burn lightly and regularly and later in the season,” he said.
“This burning will not necessarily stop the run of a large fire but will lessen the intensity and the impact.”
Government policy since the Black Saturday Royal Commission had concentrated on burns closer to settlements. “They are doing the close-in burning, and the risk-based strategy is also good,” he said. Inevitably, however, there would be big fires in the back country.
He said lightning strikes had to be put out, not left to burn out “naturally”. “Otherwise they do a lot of damage. When they start to run, ideally they run into a mosaic of burnt areas. The mosaic approach won’t stop them, but it will slow it and reduce spotting,” he said.
“It also means there are refuges – fire does not run into areas burnt – where animals can get into and have some chance of getting away and repopulating other areas.”
A ‘risk adverse’ mentality meant that many important decisions were not signed off locally, but in Melbourne. “Some oversight is needed, but that’s the burn controller’s job,” he said.
Ewan said burning needed to be done across the board, both in national parks and private bush. The precautionary principle, ‘Don’t burn’, should be ‘burn more’.
Ewan said good developments included more skilled contractors active in the field, which had come through the national burning program. He praised the mechanical thinning trials as a “big, underused option”. The trials in a variety of forest types will assess whether mechanical thinning of fuel loads is an effective way of protecting forests and communities where planned burning is undesirable.
Ewan said if the back country was not burnt, it was crucial to do good burns at the interface between the bush and the public. “The bush can be thinned a long way back - it can be done commercially – and should be regularly burnt, with short rotations of three to five years, and 5-10 kilometres back,” he said.
“Hopefully the rewritten Regional Forest Agreement will give strong practical direction to this critical component of forest management. We need a visionary long-term policy,” he said.
“We cannot be risk adverse even though this will be difficult for the politicians and the department and the workers doing the burning. The Government and the firefighters must be fully supported and encouraged especially when something goes wrong.”