Daily Fire Danger Ratings and Local Weather

I'm finally admitting that updating the daily Fire Danger Ratings is more of a chore than I can always handle. 

Lately I've been missing the updates about one day in three, and even though the information was still accessible, I feel guilty about not being consistent in the presentation of the data.  So to make the situation clearer for people logging on to see this data, I've moved it to a tab on the line under the blog heading.

Apart from taking some work off my shoulders, the new arrangement allows more scope for adding relevant information, without having to redesign the blog layout.

New Climate Council report on bushfires and climate change in Australia

2013 has been a year of record-breaking temperatures, below-average rainfall in many areas, and unfortunately, a severe start to the fire season in the Blue Mountains.

The Climate Council has just released a landmark report on the links between climate change and bushfires - to answer many of the questions now being asked increasingly frequently in the community.

In summary, the top six findings of the report's authors are:

• Climate change is already increasing the risk of bushfires.
• In southeast Australia the fire season is becoming longer, reducing the opportunities for hazard reduction burning.
• Recent severe fires have been influenced by record hot, dry conditions.
• In the future, Australia is very likely to experience an increased number of days with extreme fire danger.
• It is crucial that communities, emergency services, health services and other authorities prepare for the increasing severity and frequency of extreme fire conditions.
• This is the critical decade for action.

You can read more and share the report HERE.

Surviving bushfires and cyclones - Catalyst Special on this Sunday night

This Sunday December 01, 2013 at 7.30pm - ABC Catalyst 1 hour special on surviving extremes

Two Australian families will be simultaneously hit by a Category 3 tropical cyclone and a catastrophic bushfire.

Are they ready? ... And are you?

This major TV event was put together with the assistance of the BoM, NSW RFS, NSW SES, Dr Rob Gordon, Prof Sandy MacFarlane and some funding came from EMA.

To view a trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX4bm4VpEkA&feature=youtu.be

Bushfire preparedness vital - preliminary survey results from Blue Mountains bushfires

The preliminary results of research compiled by the Rural Fire Service and CSIRO in the immediate wake of the Blue Mountains fires have been released.

An article published in The Land on 21 November reported that people's level of preparedness was found to be vital, particularly when carried out well ahead of the blazes.  In addition, people's readiness to stay and defend their homes was critical in determining which houses were saved and which were destroyed in last month's bushfires.

 
Preparedness factors which significantly reduced the likelihood that a house would be destroyed included removing or reducing ground-level vegetation and removing ignitable material on or close to homes, according to Justin Leonard, CSIRO's leader in bushfire urban design research.
 
Leaving material that can ignite under ember attack - such as storing a caravan or boat close to a house, retaining wooden furniture on decks, and failing to clear gutters of leaves - were all factors in determining whether a house caught fire.

 

You can read the full article here:  http://www.theland.com.au/news/agriculture/general/news/bushfire-preparedness-vital/2679197.aspx?storypage=0

Thanks to Craig Welden from the SEQ Fire and Biodiversity Consortium for bringing this article to my attention

Introducing fire-relevant websites: the Google Australia Crisis Map

During the recent NSW bushfires Google extended their Crisis Map coverage to Australia.  There is a site which provides an overview map of Australia, currently showing information for five states (including Queensland), and a NSW map showing fire and some emergency events for that state.  The NSW site appears to be a beta site at present.

Similar icons used for Qld and NSW.  Some 'other emergency' information for NSW (the white icon).  All icons are clickable to retrieve basic information about the event.

Both sites show fire data drawn from the relevant fire agencies, using the same icons for Queensland and NSW as the Queensland Rural Fire Service's Current Bushfire Incidents website (you can find my overview description of this site here). However the permitted burn data from Queensland is not linked to this map.

The NSW site currently has satellite images from a few of the January fires, available as layers that can be individually selected, as well as links in the sidebar that zoom directly to particular satellite image overlays.

The overview site opens with a map of Australia, with options in the sidebar to zoom to particular states.  The sidebar provides a legend for the symbols used in each state.

The Australian overview site shows traffic levels for the capital CBD and nearby freeways for several states.

 From a bushfire information point of view, in its current state of development the site provides less information than the RFS Bushfire Incident Map website (no permitted burn locations), but with Google's resources behind it is one well worth monitoring for future developments.

Fire in Bushland Conservation in Southeast Queensland

One of our Smokespotters has drawn my attention to a publication on the role and use of fire in biodiversity conservation in Southeast Queensland (thanks Geoff).

Fire in Bushland Conservation: the role of fire in the landscape and how we can manage it for biodiversity conservation presents a very good overview of both the role of fire in the ecology of SEQ habitats and the conservation implications of fire frequency and intensity.

The document is available as a pdf file at: http://www.fireandbiodiversity.org.au/_literature_48156/Fire_Ecology_Booklet or as a hard copy from the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service Regional Bushcare Facilitator (contact: 07 3202 0233).  (As the document is undated, I'm unsure whether this position still exists after the recent cuts to government services in SEQ, but it is definitely available on the Fire and Biodiversity Consortium web site).

Introducing fire-relevant websites - the Current Bushfire Incidents Map

This is the first of a series of posts introducing websites with some relevance to bushfires and/or emergency situations in Southeast Queensland.

The Current Bushfire Incidents Map

This map is on the Queensland Rural Fire Service website at: https://ruralfire.qld.gov.au/map.html

The map distinguishes between "bushfire incidents" which are shown by default on the map when it opens (above), and "current permitted burns" which are shown if the tick box on the lower left of the map is clicked (below).

Both maps can be zoomed, either by using the controls in the top left of the map, which tend to move in fairly large "jumps", or by "double clicking" on the area on the map where you want the centre of your view to be.  Combining the on-map controls with dragging the view area is better for getting to the general area of interest (there frequently isn't space to click between the symbols in the zoomed-out view).  Once in the general area double-clicking changes the degree of zooming in smaller increments.

The blue flame icons indicate that "a fire or other emergency has started in the area however there is no immediate threat" (see the Legend below the map for the meanings of other symbols used). But note that there is a warning at the bottom of the web page that "The symbols represent the general area of the fire, not its current location or spread."

Clicking on one of these symbols provides an overview of the information available.  The difference between the Reported date and the Latest Update date can suggest whether the fire is a large one (longer duration).  The fire location is given, though this has to be treated with some caution.  The location may be the nearest street to the fire, and where there are large properties involved, or a property has access via a long easement off a public road, the fire may be a considerable distance from the address given.

Clicking on the "More information" link opens the QFRS Incident Page for that particular fire in a separate window.

The key information on this page is the "Current Status" field.  "Going" means that firefighting resources are deployed to the fire.  You can find the explanations of other status types in the Legend below the map.

The overview information available for Permitted Burns (represented by document icons) show the Reported and Latest Update dates.

Because the QFRS Incident Pages associated with permitted burns always give the Current Status as "Going" I assume that permitted burns do not appear on the Incident Map until they are notified to FireComm immediately prior to lighting up.  But two things are important to note in relation to permitted burns. The first is that the "Going" status refers to the date of the Latest Update, not the date on which you access the Incident Map.  The second is that not all permitted burns are notified to FireComm, even though this is a condition of permit, so they will not appear on the map, and our experience is that not all permitted burns notified to FireComm appear on the Incident Map.  This seems to be particularly the case in our area with permitted burns in the southern part of the Helidon Hills.

It is also possible to subscribe to an RSS feed of with a list of current incidents from the QFRS which includes GeoRSS data and summary information where available.  There is also a KML Incident feed which opens in Google Earth and displays incident locations.  Information on these feeds is at: https://ruralfire.qld.gov.au/mapfeeds.html.  Both are updated every 30 minutes.

Fire Danger Ratings: an embarrassment of riches, or just confusion?

You can see the Forest Fire Danger Rating for Friday 25 October on the right.  The whole of the Lockyer Valley Region is rated Low-Moderate.

The Grassland Fire Danger Rating for Friday is available by clicking on the Legend on the right, or by going to the Emergency Information - Queensland website.  You'll have to change a "layer" setting to display the FDR info on the map (click the Layer tab, then click the Real Time tab, and click on the toggle beside the Fire Danger Rating label).

Their Grassland Fire Danger Rating map looks like this:

A much nicer image than the one on the right which is from the Rural Fire Service Website (though it has no more FDR information in it), and you might notice that the area west of Toowoomba is yellow, which indicates a Very High Grassland Fire Danger Rating - rather than the High Forest Fire Danger Rating in the map to the right.  There are good reasons for the differences between Forest and Grassland ratings which I won't go into here, but so far I haven't found any good explanation of which one you should be looking at.  I guess that if your property (and most surrounding properties) is mostly grassland then the Grassland rating would be most relevant.

However there are plans to adopt the BOM fire danger rating system in Queensland.  We are one of only two areas in Australia which have not made the transition, the NT being the other one.

You can see the BOM fire danger rating here:  http://www.bom.gov.au/qld/forecasts/bushfire.shtml, and at the time of writing (10.22pm on Thursday night) it was High. But this was the fire danger rating for the whole of the Southeast Coast Region - the BOM doesn't give fine-grained fire danger ratings like the Rural Fire Service does.

If anyone can give me an explanation of when one should look at the Forest Fire Danger Rating rather than the Grassland Fire Danger Rating, and how these differ from the BOM Fire Danger Ratings I'd be grateful.  Feel free to use my smokespotter email: smokespotters [at] gmail [dot] com.

How much does Australia rely on volunteer firefighters?

For those of us who live in the Helidon Hills it is clear that we are heavily reliant on the Rural Fire Brigade volunteers for our safety in fire events. But how about the rest of the country?

Remembering that Australia has one of the most urbanised populations in the world, you wouldn't expect the reliance to be all that high, right?

Wrong!

"... almost 2 million Australians [rely] largely on volunteer fire brigades to protect them and A$500 billion in assets."

This is from a Sydney Morning Herald article on a report by the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research.

Has bushfire risk increased due to climate change?

That's a pretty topical question, albeit one that has been around for a few years now.

Roger Jones, a Professorial Research Fellow at Victoria University, has published an article in today's issue of The Conversation which reports on research work which looks at the evidence.

"In research I did with colleagues earlier this year we looked at the Fire Danger Index calculated by the Bureau of Meteorology, and compared how it changed compared to temperature over time in Victoria.

South-east Australia saw a temperature change of about 0.8C when we compared temperatures before 1996 and after 1997. We know that it got drier after 1997 too.


We then compared this data to the Forest Fire Danger Index, to see if it showed the same pattern. We analysed fire data from nine stations in Victoria and did a non-linear analysis.


We found that fire danger in Victoria increased by over a third after 1996, compared to 1972-1996. The current level of fire danger is equivalent to the worst case projected for 2050, from an earlier analysis for the Climate Institute.


While it’s impossible to say categorically that the situation is the same in NSW, we know that these changes are generally applicable across south-east Australia. So it’s likely to be a similar case: fire and climate change are linked.

You can read the whole article here.

Are you ready?

There's no doubt that the bushfire season is upon us.  The bush and the climate in the Hills are primed for fire.

The big question is ARE YOU READY?

Here's a different way of asking the same question, courtesy of the the Warrandyte Community Association




This video is starting to go viral around Australia, if not more widely, with over 7,000 views and a spot on ABC Radio National's Bush Telegraph.  I can see why.

Spread the message.  It doesn't matter if you substitute Vinegar Hill, Buaraba Creek, Helidon or wherever, the message is highly relevant, and will only become more relevant as the summer bears down on us.

Very High Fire Danger - Monday 14 October

The fire danger in the Lockyer Valley Region today is Very High (25-50).

Winds in Gatton are currently (7.25am) 31.5km/h gusting to 42.6km/h.

If you are thinking of lighting up a permitted burn today, check your permit conditions.  It is likely that the Fire Danger Rating and wind speed conditions on your permit preclude lighting up under these conditions.  If in doubt, check with FireComm (the number is on your permit).

Remember that when you do light up a permitted burn in the Helidon Hills, let one of the Smokespotter Coordinators know (details HERE) as well as informing FireComm.

Stay safe.

Reducing Bushfire Risk to Property

Just read a very informative post on today's issue of The Conversation by Owen Price, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at University of Wollongong.

It is well worth reading the whole article as it deals with what the scientific evidence actually says about reducing the risk of house loss from bushfire, but among the interesting things he says are the following:

"In the Sydney region, 40% of all bushfires ignite within 2km of the interface where forest meets houses. This figure rises to 79% if we consider only fires that actually burn to the interface on days of extreme fire weather."

"... it is safe to say that building (and maintaining) houses to the Australian Standard for Construction of Buildings in Bushfire Prone Areas helps, and that householder preparedness makes a big difference. But most households are poorly prepared."

 "Bushfire risk reduction is most effective in and around houses and householders themselves are the ones who can make the biggest difference. But the only way to eliminate risk entirely is to move the houses away from vegetation altogether."

 Given the weather we are experiencing at this early stage in the fire season, it is a timely reminder.

Don't forget that you can find the day's Forest Fire Danger Rating for the whole of the Lockyer Valley Region in the sidebar on this website.  On the odd occasion when I am unable to update it, clicking on the old map will bring up the day's map for the whole of Queensland, with an inset for Southeast Queensland.  Please share this web address with your friends in the Region.

 
 

Fire Weather Warning - Monday 7 October 2013

Extreme Fire Danger is forecast for all of the Southeast Coast Forecast District including the Lockyer Valley Region.

The Rural Fire Service Queensland advises that fires may be unpredictable, uncontrollable and fast-moving.
 

The Rural Fire Service Queensland advises you to:

• Check your bushfire survival plan - Now.
• Monitor the fire and weather situation in any way you can through www.ruralfire.qld.gov.au and www.bom.gov.au, television or radio.
• Call Triple Zero if you see a fire.

The Rural Fire Service Queensland advises that if you are in an area of Extreme Fire Danger:

• Leaving is the only option for your survival.
• If you plan to leave finalise your options and leave early on the day.
• A well prepared and well constructed home may not be safe.

The Rural Fire Service Queensland advises that if you are in an area of Severe Fire Danger:

• Leaving is the safest option for your survival.
• If you plan to leave finalise your options and leave early on the day.
• Only stay if your home is well prepared and well constructed and you can actively defend it.
• Prepare for the emotional, mental and physical impact of defending your property - if in doubt, leave early.

For information on Fire Bans and how to Prepare. Act. Survive. Visit the Rural Fire Service web page at www.ruralfire.qld.gov.au or call the hotline on 1800 020 440.

One year of Smokespotting Blogs and Fire Danger Ratings

On 1 September this Smokespotter blog had been running for one year.

Over the course of the year I have written 66 posts, as well as putting up daily Forest Fire Danger Rating maps for the Lockyer Valley Region for the 2012/13 fire season and since the beginning of the current fire season.

In total there have been nearly 3,000 "pageviews", with the peak month being October 2012 (712) when we had the fire which eventually burned out around 5,000ha of the Hills.  The second main peak in viewing was in August this year when the weather became increasingly hot and dry.

Bushfires can occur year round: we have to be prepared

By Richard Thornton, Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC

reblogged from:

Yesterday’s fires in Sydney’s western outskirts are a timely warning for all Australian communities. Being prepared for a bushfire is not just a summer job – communities in bushfire prone areas, and in the ever-expanding urban/rural interface surrounding our cities and major towns, need to be prepared 12 months of the year.

When the conditions are right, hot and windy days, with dry vegetation, fires will occur. They are a fact of life in the environment we live in. We all must be vigilant about our local conditions.

An earlier fire season?

While summer is usually the time associated with the highest bushfire risk in the southern states across Australia, bushfire seasons are starting earlier and lasting longer.

With these longer fire seasons, fire agencies need to continually refine the education and warning messages for communities in fire prone areas. Much of the new research into bushfires is now about how best to keep communities educated and informed about these changing and evolving circumstances.

Seasonal outlooks help Australia plan for fire season. AAP Image/Dean Lewins

Part of this is the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre seasonal bushfire outlooks. Every year since 2006, before the northern and southern Australian fire seasons, the Bushfire CRC has brought together fire managers from all states and territories with Bureau of Meteorology scientists to produce seasonal bushfire outlooks for the relevant fire season. The seasonal outlooks are a useful insight for fire and land management agencies about the expected fire season, so they can plan accordingly.

What’s the outlook?

Broadly, there are two fire seasons in Australia – northern and southern fire seasons. Across northern Australia, the fire season coincides with the northern dry season during winter. In southern Australia, the fire season begins later in the year, in the lead up to, and including, summer. Depending on the location and conditions experienced, southern Australia’s fire season can run through to March or April.

Bushfire CRC seasonal bushfire outlook. Bushfire CRC

Last week the Bushfire CRC released the Southern Australia Seasonal Bushfire Outlook for this fire season. You can see from the map above that large areas of southern Australia, especially along the east and west coasts extending inland, face above normal fire potential for this fire season.

This above normal forecast is due to abundant grass growth across inland Australia, as a result of above average rainfall between May and July 2013. Grass fuels grow quickly, and this short burst of above average rainfall across inland Australia, coupled with above average temperatures across the country since January 2013, has been enough for the above normal bushfire potential to be declared.

In forested areas, a combination of factors, such as Australia’s hottest summer on record and above average temperatures over winter, has seen the bush begin to dry out.

How can we be prepared?

We know that bushfires will happen in Australia every year. But we also know from research on recent large fires that many people living in high risk bushfire areas are still under-prepared and ill-informed on the dangers and the preparations needed.

Changes to bushfire policies in the last decade have seen increased emphasis on early warning, focus on protection of human life over fighting the fires, the need for shared responsibility between official agencies and the community for bushfire safety, and the use of personal bushfire survival planning and protection areas around the home.

This week’s bushfires in NSW have taught us we don’t know everything about being prepared.

 AAP Image/Dean Lewins

This change in the way that bushfires, and indeed other hazards, are managed has been strengthened by the extensive and concerted research efforts. The psychological motivations and other reasons behind an individual’s decision to act or not to act in advance of a fire, sometimes despite their best intentions, is better understood by fire agencies applying the research.

The scope of work such this, so important in helping agencies communicate fire preparedness, has now been extended to include other natural hazards in Australia through the newly formed Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC. There are many common areas between fire and other hazards. For example, with fire and flood, community issues are comparable, response issues and incident management are similar and recovery issues have many common threads.

The bushfires on Sydney’s urban/rural fringe yesterday, before the official, declared fire season in New South Wales, are another demonstration that we do not know everything about being prepared for emergencies. We need to urgently find new and better ways to help people understand what it means to live with threat of bushfire, flood, cyclone and other natural hazards, year round.

We need to ensure lessons are learnt from each event, and that policies and practices are changed, based on sound, scientific research, to safeguard the community. There is still a lot more to do.

Both the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC and the Bushfire CRC receive funding though the federal government’s CRC program and state and territory fire, land management and emergency service agencies.


This article was originally published at The Conversation.
 
Read the original article.

Gradually gaining recognition

It is heartening to see that more and more we are being advised of planned light-ups of permitted burns.  And not just by individual landowners - corporate and government landowners are beginning to give us advanced warning of light-ups.

This is an important development for a voluntary group like ours, where each smoke sighting can consume the time of lots of people.  For an "easy" fire, from the time a Coordinator receives the first notification with a bearing on the smoke to the point of filing it away as one of the following: a permitted controlled burn; a known wildfire; an unreported wildfire; or outside our area of interest, at least three Smokespotters will have been involved for varying periods, and it will have taken around 40 minutes of the Coordinator's time.

A fire that is more difficult to locate (perhaps due to strong winds, smoke haze, or other atmospheric conditions) may have involved both Coordinators for more than two hours, maybe seven or eight Smokespotters, and one or two government agencies.

Obviously, where we have advice of the lighting up of a planned burn, the time and number of people involved is likely to be much less.  The more we can achieve this situation, the longer we are likely to keep Coordinators and Smokespotters motivated to be involved in the group.  And, equally important, the more accurate we can be in our identification of the source of smoke, which translates into fewer "false alarms" to FireComm and Rural Fire Brigades.  Our credibility is the key to obtaining a quick response from the relevant agencies to our identification of unplanned fires.

So, please, encourage your friends, neighbours and employers to give one of the Smokespotter Coordinators a call when they are about to light up a permitted burn.  It's not that difficult to give us a call at the same time as they call FireComm to report they are lighting up (which is a condition of the permit).

New look to the daily Fire Danger Rating clip

I've finally found a way to put the boundary of the Lockyer Valley Regional Council area on the clip of the daily Fire Danger Rating.

The boundary is actually in the large, state-wide pdf of the Fire Danger Rating, but only appears when the image is enlarged then manipulated to reduce the number of Kb I have to upload. It's there, but too faint, so I manually trace it each day using Skitch (finally found a use for that program) which is the reason it will look slightly different from day to day.

Before I get emails about the location of Gatton, that's how it is on the original.  If you need to locate Gatton accurately, it is actually on the same east-west line, but directly below the "w" shape in the northern boundary of the LVRC area.  However the Fire Danger Rating maps are not so fine grained that the small error matters in terms of knowing your local FDR.

Thanks to the Rural Fire Service IT section for confirming that the faint lines in the FDR pdf correspond to the LVRC area boundary.

The Fire Season is Here

Looks like the fire season in the Helidon Hills has arrived.

I have started up the daily Fire Danger Rating map (in the box to the right) which is clipped from the official state-wide map released daily - see the links to this elsewhere in this blog.

We have had three fires located by the Smokespotter group this month.  Two were controlled burns - we had been notified of the lighting up of these by Private Forestry Services Queensland (a private company contracted to carry out the controlled burns), and they assisted us in confirming that the smoke sightings were in fact their burns. The third was outside of our area of interest, and was around 8km north of the turnoff to the Spring Creek Prison.

The practice of Fire Wardens in our area of adding a note to Fire Permits that the Helidon Hills Smokespotters should be advised at the time of lighting up (when FireComm also needs to be notified) is very much appreciated.

Locating these fires provided a good refresher for the Coordinators (me and KP - see details under the Coordinators above) and a few members of the Smokespotter group.

We are starting the season with a new Smokespotter on a high point in the Iredale area from where he has a good view of a significant part of the Helidon Hills.  I delivered his compass last week, as well as another to one of our group on the edge of the Toowoomba range (he had been using a hiking compass till now).  These compasses were part of a set of ten new Silva bearing compasses given to the Smokespotters by the Lockyer Valley Regional Council.

The Smokespotters' website will resume shortly

Thanks for checking in on the Helidon Hills Smokespotters website.

This site is inactive for most of the period between fire seasons - it is a volunteer effort and is generally only "active" in the run-up to the fire season.

If you are a resident of the Helidon Hills or otherwise have a need to be kept up to date on fire-related matters in the Hills, you might like to join the Smoke & Fire email list.  Just email us at smokespotters [at*] gmail.com, with a request to be put onto the Smoke & Fire list.  You should receive a confirmation email within a few days, and then group emails during the fire season.

* remove the spaces and square brackets and insert the @ symbol as in a normal email address.

Fact and Myth about Fire Wardens in Queensland

There's a new link on our Permits to Burn tab, under the heading "Frequently Asked Questions about Fire Wardens and their powers".

 The link is to a document on the Rural Fire Brigades Association of Queensland website listing a range of myths about Fire Wardens and giving the actual situation for each, with a detailed explanation.  The document is dated November 2012.

Here's an example from the document:

Interesting article on prevention of arson

This article appeared in today's issue of The Conversation.

Bushfire arson: prevention is the cure

By Janet Stanley, Monash University and Paul Read, Monash University
 
At this time of year, each year – the bushfire season – the complex nature of human behaviour hits home. Bushfires are a terrible event. The environmental destruction, the loss of property and sometimes lives, the damage to infrastructure, the fear and uncertainty, all take their toll in terms of financial and psychological costs. Extensive time and resources are rushed into emergency responses and the immediate aftermath of the fire – the fire needs to be put out, people need to be safe and have their basic needs met.

It is suggested that, of the approximately 60,000 bushfires which occur in Australia each year, one-third to a half are deliberately lit. Some believe that this proportion is much higher.

The occurrence of bushfire is only going to get worse. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report predicts that in south-east Australia the frequency of very high and extreme fire danger days is likely to rise by between 4% and 25% by 2020 and between 15% and 70% by 2050. This increase in fire danger is likely to be associated with a reduced interval between fires, increased fire intensity, a decrease in fire extinguishments and faster fire spread. The implication of this is that many more fires which have been deliberately lit will become more dangerous.

The irony is that so much more could be done, both during and outside the fire season, to prevent the occurrence of fires and prevent the terrible losses and trauma. Yet few resources are allocated to either better understanding the drivers of bushfire or taking action to prevent the fire.

The cost of arson in Australia, according to recent Monash University work, was found to be $1.1 billion in 2009-2010, and this doesn’t include human or environmental costs. If only some of this cost was spent in prevention rather than repair.

The present response largely revolves around environmental modification, particularly around extensive cool burning. There are now serious questions as to whether this policy can be achieved and if it is the best way to go. A more comprehensive policy platform is needed to better target the situational conditions (where fires are lit, such as behind
schools), and behavioural causes (for example, fires are often lit outside after school).

One example of excellent prevention work to raise community awareness, act as a deterrent and facilitate reporting of suspicion of arson is being undertaken by the Gippsland Arson Prevention Program (GAPP), in Victoria. Work is being undertaken on a voluntary basis in a collaboration between all sectors – business, the police, CFA, emergency services, the local council, the Department of Environment and Sustainability, Crime Stoppers and Monash Sustainability Institute.

Very little is known about people who intentionally light fires in Australia. However, we do know that they are largely male. About 40% are 15 to 20 years of age, 30% over 30 and about 10% children aged 10 to 15 years. About half of those over 15 years are unemployed. About two-thirds have, or will have, a conviction for violence – they are troubled people.
Even the little bit of knowledge we have suggests directions for prevention of arson. The disengagement of youth from employment and studying is a disgrace in Victoria, with youth unemployment – 15 to 19 years, the very age group which has the highest propensity to light fires – at 29.5% as of July 2012. This official figure is likely to be an under-estimation of the actual number.

Recent research at Monash Sustainability Institute has shown that some people are reluctant to report a suspicion of arson. Strong pathways from reporting to prevention need to be built, with resources for both arson investigation and an appropriate legal response, and treatment opportunities.

In 2005-06, 2,926 arson charges were laid in Victoria, while 39 people were sentenced in Victoria’s higher courts. Over the five years, 31% – 12 people, just over two people a year – received a term of imprisonment. One year was the most common sentence.

Significant new thinking is needed around bushfire arson prevention, aimed at structural, service design and operational levels and supported by research and evaluation of effects. A reduction in bushfire arson needs transformational, rather than incremental, change across all points of prevention. Not least of these prevention measures is a far more effective response to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Janet Stanley has received funding from the Office of the Emergency Services Commissioner, Department of Justice, Victorian Government and from RACV Insurance, Victoria, which was used for research for Crime Stoppers on community attitudes to reporting arson.

Paul Read's work has been funded by the Department of Justice, Victoria and the Office of the Fire Commissioner.


This article was originally published at . Read the original article.