Forest failure: 600,000 tonnes of fallen trees set to trigger fire storm

Despite repeated warnings, 600,000 tonnes of fallen trees have been left lying on the Wombat Forest floor ready to fuel a fire storm.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has failed to defuse a ticking fire bomb of fallen trees left lying on the Wombat Forest floor since they were bowled over by June 2021 storms.

Despite calls for action, dating back to early last year, little progress has been made on clearing what recent analysis shows is about 600,000 tonnes of fallen trees, spread across 2500ha at densities ranging from 200 to 240 tonnes per hectare.

The fallen timber load across another 20,000ha of the Wombat Forest sits at close to 100t/ha, compared to undamaged forest loads of 20 to 50 tonnes per hectare.

The nation’s top bushfire scientist, University of Melbourne Associate Professor Kevin Tolhurst, has warned the fallen timber risks fuelling a fire storm that would engulf nearby towns.

“That’s when you see these big mushroom clouds, up to 12km high (as the fire) creates its own weather,” Prof Tolhurst said.

He said normally the Wombat Forest would not be regarded as big enough to create the massive convection-driven fires that Victorians had seen on Black Saturday 2009 and during the 2019-20 summer.

“(But) with all this fallen wood you get five times as much energy resulting from every hectare, so you only need a fifth of the area to produce that convection column,” Prof Tolhurst said. “It’s impossible to stop.”

Yet despite these warnings VicForests’ attempts to clear the Wombat forest of fallen timber have been repeatedly stymied by government bureaucrats, legal action by environmental groups, protests and vandalism of contractors’ heavy machinery.

Just this week the Wombat Forestcare Group lodged a summons with VicForests trying to block local firewood cutters Dale Tiley and Gary Kirby salvaging fallen trees from a 20ha site in the Wombat Forest.

Mr Tiley said they only had a quota of 4000 tonnes, which would hardly make a dent in the massive fuel load of twisted logs and debris that still lay across the forest.

But now he had no idea as to whether they could continue working on the coupe.

Wombat Forestcare convener Gayle Osborne said legal action was being taken because VicForests had failed to adequately survey the site for threatened species.

However Ms Osborne refused to make further comment until she had spoken to her barrister.

Meanwhile Mr Kirby said: “We’re all just banging our heads against a brick wall”, with no support from the Andrews Government.

Prof Tolhurst said it would take 40 to 50 years for the fallen timber to break down.

Forest Fire Management Victoria chief fire officer Chris Hardman said “record rain over the past two years has provided challenges to safely clear storm fallen timber in Wombat Forest”.