Extreme Fire Danger is forecast for all of the Southeast Coast Forecast Districtincluding 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.
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.
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Bushfires can occur year round: we have to be prepared
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
