Inaction increases megafire risk: MP

THE Brumby Government revealed in its recent budget that the Black Saturday bushfires would cost more than $1 billion.

Yet, according to Craig Ingram, the independent member for East Gippsland, one of the state's most fire-prone electorates, it has failed to embrace the cheaper and more effective route of increasing off-season burns.

Although the budget included new equipment for firefighters, and $52million for fuel-reduction burning, it did not provide extra staff to assist in the off-season burns.

The Government has a target to burn 130,000ha of forest in the off-season and as, John Brumby is fond of saying, it exceeded that by burning 156,000ha last year.

However, this Government and its predecessor have frequently failed to even get close to this target. Last year's total was the highest in two decades and the Department of Sustainability and Environment believes 385,000ha a year is a safer target.

The Premier insisted in a parliamentary hearing this week that the success or otherwise of off-season burning was not down to money. "It's not a resource issue; the key to it is the number of days that it is deemed safe to conduct fuel reduction burns," he said. "The constraint here is a climatic constraint."

Then there's the inevitable backlash to burning off. As one Department of Natural Resources chief quoted in Ingram's report puts it: "Why should I carry out prescribed burning? All I get is criticism about smoke and destruction of habitat and biodiversity and my staff is vilified by people who know nothing of fire suppression ... I would be better off to let the fuels accumulate, have larger wildfires and have my people hailed as heroes."

The Royal Commission into Australia's devastating Black Saturday Fires back in February is underway. 173 people died, whole towns were flattened, and people are trying to see what lessons can be learned.

For me, as a volunteer firefighter, the most chilling realisation is just how far beyond our ability to fight these fires were. In Australia, we use the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index to describe fire conditions. This is meant to be a scale of 0 to 100 - 100 being set at the level of the 1939 Black Friday fires, previously the worst ever experienced.

A serious fire is around a 20 on the index. Extreme danger is 50. 100 was considered the top of the scale.

On Black Saturday, the danger statewide hit 180. At its peak in some areas, it hit 328.

It seems that we may have been lucky that our command system failed on Black Saturday - if they'd managed to get fire fighters in between the towns and fires, they wouldn't have stopped the blazes for a second.

I'd honestly and sincerely be ready to die in a fire to protect others - but we'd have died for nothing out there.

There are fires that are so intense, we lack the ability to fight them. That makes it so much more critical we do what we can to begin with to make them less severe. Lines of firetrucks couldn't stop fires bearing down on Marysville - cleared firebreaks might have done something. Getting rid of excess fuel might have done something.

Well, for Pete sake, this is the government we're talking about. What did this guy expect? Just as all cats are gray in the dark, all politicians are the same the world over.

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