Australian Bush Fires:Memories of Canberra blaze rekindled

Memories of Canberra blaze rekindled

BY NYSSA SKILTON
Canberra Times
10/02/2009

Victoria's bushfires have stirred memories of Canberra's own bushfire disaster just six years ago, raising the question: What has been learnt?

Bushfire and meteorology specialist David Packham, of Monash University in Melbourne, said nothing had changed in forest management since the Canberra 2003 fires and Victoria was suffering the consequences. ''The mismanagement of the south-eastern forests of Australia over the last 30 or 40 years by excluding prescribed burning and fuel management has led to the highest fuel concentrations we have ever had in human occupation,'' Mr Packham said.

''The state has never been as dangerous as what it is now and this has been quite obvious for some time. ''It is a recipe for the disaster that we have had.'' Mr Packham, who is a research fellow at Monash University's School of Geography and Environmental Science, said a ''God almighty brawl'' was about to erupt in Australia about how forests should be managed to reduce the risk of bushfires.
''There has been a total lack of willingness to instigate a proper fuel reduction management program based on the skills and understanding of indigenous people who, after all, for tens of thousands of years were the stewards of our environment,'' he said. ''We have thumbed our noses at what these people did and knew and we just can't keep on doing it.''
The director of the centre for environmental risk management of bushfires at the University of Wollongong, Professor Ross Bradstock, said now was not the time to speculate on what went wrong. ''There needs to be more sober appraisal to figure out exactly what's happened,'' he said. ''We know these very big destructive fires have occurred before in Victoria under very different eras of management.'' Professor Bradstock said scientific knowledge of bushfires was quite rudimentary.

He said, like Canberra in January 2003, the conditions in Victoria on Saturday were off the top of the fire danger scale. ''We actually have no formal scientific knowledge of the way fires behave in the upper part of the fire danger scale, let along off the top of the danger scale,'' he said. ''Yes, we have scientists and people working on the problem, but these are extraordinary phenomena and we don't fully comprehend them.'' Professor Bradstock said there was no prescribed burning solution which would totally eliminate risk of bushfire. ''Anything we do in terms fire management is about the reduction in risk,'' he said.

''Understanding the best use of resources to reduce risk is still a formidable challenge. We don't have all the answers.'' CSIRO bushfire researcher Andrew Sullivan said aerial shots of Marysville, depicting green street trees dotted among destroyed houses, reminded him of what he had seen in Canberra in 2003. ''It implies to me that what's happened is house-to-house spread after the fire front has gone through,'' he said. ''That's what happened in Canberra. Primarily the bushfire hit Eucumbene Drive and Warragamba Drive [Duffy] and spot fires started in the gardens of houses that lined those streets.'' Mr Sullivan said prior to Saturday, he would have said Australia was becoming better at dealing with bushfires.