Thousands of fallen trees left to fuel Wombat Forest fire storm

Bureaucratic delays mean tens of thousands of windblown trees have split in Wombat Forest and are no longer worth salvaging.

Just 20 per cent of the 500,000 tonnes of windblown trees left lying on the Wombat forest floor since the June 2021 storms have been cleared and salvaged, despite warnings they are a “ticking fire bomb” set to engulf nearby towns.

Contractors tasked with recovering the fallen trees say 20 months of bureaucratic delays and hurdles meant most of the timber was now split and not worth salvaging.

Harvest and haulage contractors Colin Robin and Jim Greenwood said the thousands of fallen trees that litter the forest floor could have helped some of the state’s saw mills that faced shortages, and delivered royalty revenue to the Victorian Government.

“Even back in January you could see a lot of them (fallen trees) were cracked out – radial cracking,” Mr Robin said.

It’s a year since The Weekly Times first reported the former Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning’s conservation regulator had repeatedly blocked bids by the Dja Dja Wurrung and VicForests to clear the tens of thousands of messmate, narrow-leaf peppermint, manna and other gums that lay on the forest floor after the June 2021 storms.

The delay prompted Premier Daniel Andrews to step in last April to get salvage work started, after University of Melbourne forest fire expert Kevin Tolhurst warned the fallen trees could fuel a fire storm.

But it appears the Premier’s intervention came to nothing, with VicForests contractors saying they have struggled to overcome even more bureaucratic hurdles since then, as well as vandalism of their machinery and environmental activists walking onto their work sites.

Between them the contractors have only managed to salvage fallen trees from about 297ha of the 1800ha of windblown forest, with satellite images showing thousands of stormblown trees still lying on the forest floor.

Mr Greenwood first began salvaging logs in April last year, but two months later DELWP’s conservation regulator ordered him to produce hundreds of pages of documents outlining his truck routes, drivers names and addresses, workers’ time sheets and all business records and contracts linked to salvaging the Wombat Forest.

Mr Robin said he also struggled to gain heavy vehicle permits last year to use his B-double trucks on the DELWP-managed roads, with a process that normally takes a few days dragging on for five weeks.

Mr Robin said the latest hurdle was the newly renamed Department of Environment, Energy and Climate Action’s discovery of the vulnerable wombat bush pea in the forest, which is one of the first plants to germinate where there’s disturbance.

“The department wants a 20m buffer around them, which means you can’t get in, because they’ve come up like blackberries everywhere,” Mr Robin said.

Mr Greenwood said the discovery of the pea meant he and his crew could not even get into their landing to collect 15 loads of stacked timber.

A spokesman for the conservation regulator said its office had “not blocked legal timber harvesting from occurring in Victoria, including in the Wombat State Forest, and had provided information to all relevant parties about how to harvest consistent with the law.”