Scientists hit back over hazard reduction
Scientists have revealed the compelling reasons why there wasn’t more fire hazard reduction work carried out before this already deadly bushfire season hit us.
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Scientists have hit back at criticisms that insufficient fire hazard reduction measures were carried out before the start of this already horrific bushfire season, saying the window in order to carry out prescribed burning was narrower than ever before.
The deadly blazes in New South Wales and Queensland have in themselves ignited a debate about fuel load management, with critics saying environmental concerns resulted in an excess of fuel to burn.
But Professor David Bowman, Director of the Fire Centre Research Hub at The University of Tasmania, said it was practicalities and not politics that had hampered prescribed burning efforts.
“It’s disingenuous to suggest biodiversity concerns have substantially changed fuel management programs,” he said.
“Frankly those concerns are really to the side and haven’t impeded fuel management programs.”
“It’s very difficult and expensive work. You can’t just go into the landscape and start burning it in populated areas. That idea works in unpopulated landscapes – but in the areas where you’ve got settlements and farms, it’s a more complicated process.”
Issues of legal liability and the health effects from smoke were just two of the considerations fire services had to consider when carrying out prescribed burning operations, Prof Bowman said.
Professor Ross Bradstock, Director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong, said data showed the level of prescribed burning in NSW was around 200,000 hectares each year.
“The treatment rate is about 1 per cent per annum, and that costs about $100 million,” he said. “That puts into perspective the issue.”
Prof Bradstock noted the fire season had been declared early this year on September 1 – literally the day after winter – and as a result there “hasn’t been a lot of hazard reduction work in NSW this spring”.
More than one million hectares had burnt already this season, and “we’re not even into summer yet”.
He described the situation as “uncharted territory” and said fires near Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie and Taree were “burning through areas that are often too wet to burn”.
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Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a Future Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, said the bushfire season had lengthened and extreme bushfire events were getting more frequent.
“Since 1900 the waiting time between extreme fires in Victoria has halved,” she said.
Although the “catastrophic” level of fire warning was only used for the first time in 2009, it was rare for that level to be needed at this time of year, she said.
Another headache for fire fighters is that blazes are behaving in sometimes unexpected ways, for example by burning more voraciously through the night, whereas previously that was a period in which they used to calm down, Prof Bowman said.
“The shoulders of the peak fire period are expanding,” he said.
“This was first reported in California. (Firefighters said) it was as if the fire didn’t know it wasn’t daytime.”
Originally published as Scientists hit back over hazard reduction