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).