Fire

In a significant step toward joint land management between the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service (PWS) and Tasmanian Aboriginal people, PWS Aboriginal Fire Rangers employees have completed their first cultural burn at Dempster Plains on the West Coast.  

A new exhibition that pays tribute to the resilience of the Scenic Rim region following the devastating bushfires that raged across the region during the Black Summer of 2019-2020 has opened at The Centre in Beaudesert.

Traditional Owner knowledge was shared among land managers in a Cultural Burning workshop held on Kabi Kabi Country at a Sunshine Coast Council environment reserve near Kenilworth recently.

Following some threatening fire seasons, the Territory Government allocated $2 million towards updating firefighting infrastructure to keep lives and properties safe. Recently, two new 350,000 litre water tanks were installed at both Batchelor and Hughes Airstrips, costing $150,000.

Shire of Gingin brigades will join City of Wanneroo brigades in having access to their own thermal imaging cameras this bushfire season ... The cameras help firefighters identify hotspots in bushfires, enabling them to target specific areas and deploy their resources accordingly. They are also an important tool to detect fires burning underground, which are a common threat in Western Australia and can cause bushfires to reignite after they have been extinguished.

September 1st 2021 saw the commencement of the Bush Fire Danger Period for Coastal NSW, including 21 Local Government Areas (LGAs). This brings the total number of LGAs currently experiencing heightened bush fire risk to 27 across NSW. Minister for Police and Emergency Services David Elliott said it is important that communities in these coastal areas are aware of their bush fire risk.

Forests across all tenures are declining and/or exploding from lack of sustainable management. A miniscule proportion is available for logging. Logging can have a beneficial effect on local fire behaviour, but no effect on a regional scale. The bushfires and logging debate is a dangerous distraction from our real major environmental issue – sustainable fire management.

Following months of record rainfall and vegetation growth residents are urged to start preparing their families and properties for the coming bushfire season. City of Greater Geraldton Mayor Shane Van Styn said a well prepared home and property is more likely to survive a bush fire and can also be easier to defend.

World-first technology is being used to rebuild natural habitats destroyed by bushfires, creating more than 800 new hollows that will provide displaced animals with a space to nest and roost for an accumulated 56,000 years.

Gabrielle Duykers. Local residents have planted more than 2000 native tree species across Avenue Range to help rejuvenate land affected by the Blackford fire. Titled ‘green is the new black’, the revitalisation project has been organised by the newly-formed Avenue Tree Group.

In southern Australia, whether native forests are subject to harvesting or left untouched, if appropriate landscape scale forest fuel management is not undertaken, high intensity bushfires at a mega scale can occur in any summer, particularly when there are two or more years of below average rainfall. Any climate change effects are a reason to do more mitigation by fuel reduction.

We have a fire problem in Australia that is not being addressed. And it has nothing to do with climate change. Nor is logging a major contributing factor since very small areas are available for harvesting each year. It is about the decisions in the 1990s across most states, but particularly in NSW and Victoria to lock up millions of hectares of forest into national parks and manage them by benign neglect and allow the fuel levels to build up.

The study, published in Ecosphere, analysed the severity of Australia's 2019-2020 bushfires by examining the amount of damage to vegetation. Co-author Professor David Lindenmayer said weather had a large effect on the fires. "However, forests also burned at very high severity when they were between 10 to 40 years old. Young forests regenerating after logging were particularly susceptible to very high severity fire," he said.

Rappville ice cream and a special tablecloth are part of a recovery project in response to the 2019 bushfires. Leading the Creative Recovery Project are artists Charlotte Haywood and Lyndall Phelps who have spent time in Rappville this year working with the community as part of the Arts Northern Rivers initiative.

John O'Donnell. Real data gathered from almost 60 years of historical data from the forests of south west WA unequivocally shows that when the area of prescribed burning trends down, the area of uncontrolled bushfires (wildfires) trends up. There is a simple explanation: bushfires are more difficult to put out in long unburnt, heavy fuels ... New technology is assisting in increasing the safety and efficiency of prescribed burning programs.

Two serious bushfires in the Shire of Gingin earlier this year were due to accidental causes, according to the Department of Fire and Emergency Services. In Gingin on April 28 a bushfire ignited near the intersection of Jones St and Roe St while the Red Gully bushfire started on January 2 near the intersection of Mogumber Rd West and Brand Hwy.

A new paper reviewing the science behind claims that forest management and timber harvesting worsened the 2019/20 bushfires has been welcomed by the professional association representing some 1,000 scientific and professional forest land managers in Australia.

A retinue of 38 specialists from NSW firefighting and emergency services will join an Australian deployment to Canada to assist firefighters as they continue to battle devastating wild fires.

Western Australia's Career Fire and Rescue Service (CFRS) has welcomed 26 new firefighters into its ranks as the State enters the busiest period for home fires ... The new recruits bring a wide range of knowledge and experience to the CFRS, having transitioned from careers in education, defence, engineering and other emergency services.

Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, and Optus have released findings of a joint nationwide project to improve bushfire resilience of critical telecommunications. The research analysed where there is risk of damage to the network and where upgrades could reduce vulnerability to future bushfire events.

Cultural burning doesn't just occur in northern Australia. Across southern Australia, many Indigenous people are practicing and promoting cultural fire management, yet the emergency management sector has limited experience in collaborating with them on fire management.

Kevin Tolhurst, Jerry Vanclay. Some ecologists and conservationists, opposed to timber harvesting, are trying to use bushfire disasters as a lever to stop native forest harvesting, but their case is based on opinion, beliefs and selective science. A 2016 study of over 1 million hectares burnt by wildfire in the 2003 fires in Victoria, showed that fire severity across the landscape was driven by weather conditions, slope aspect, fuel levels, atmospheric stability, and the scale of the fires. There was no discernible impact of timber harvesting on fire severity at the landscape scale.