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.