Long, hot bushfire season ahead in Victoria, authorities warn

VICTORIAN authorities expect there will be at least 4500 grass and bush fires during the looming “above normal” season.

Emergency Services Minister Jane Garrett and Commissioner Craig Lapsley visit Anglesea fire station to talk about summer fire risk and congestion on the Great Ocean Road. Picture: Glenn Ferguson

EXPECT a long, hot, dry summer.

That was the message from the Victorian Government following the latest forecast.

Emergency Management Commissioner Craig Lapsley said an above normal fire season had been forecast for Victoria.

“The term above normal will see us run to maybe 4500 — 5000 (grass and bush) fires across the state,” Mr Lapsley said.

“The summer will potentially start in November and run right through to March. So it’s not just summer as we know it, it’ll last through autumn,” he said.

“And we’ve got the potential to have hotter days.”

Mr Lapsley joined Emergency Services Minister Jane Garrett to remind Victorians to ensure they were prepared for bushfires.

“We need people to understand it will be long, hot and dry, we need people to have their fire plans ready,” Ms Garrett said.

“We’ve had a shivery, cold winter, but while we feel we’ve had a cold winter — unfortunately that winter has not yielded the rainfall that we would like and we have had below average rainfall in much of the state,” she said.

Mr Lapsley was concerned that parts of regional Victoria were already very dry.

“Victoria is one of the most fire prone parts of the world and the forecast maps show that central and western Victoria already are the driest parts of the state,” Mr Lapsley said.

“Farmers are telling us it is dry … in some parts it is almost a semi-drought.

“There are some dams in rural Victoria that are low on water now and they haven’t had the winter rains to fill them.”

“You could draw a very generic line from Sunbury to Ballarat to Horsham — in a westerly direction — and then from Horsham to Bendigo.

“Now that’s a very generic area, but if you took that as the generic driest part, which covers central and western Victoria, that’s certainly the driest part of the state.”

Mr Lapsley did not say how much prescribed burning had taken place in Victoria in the lead up to summer, but said the “planned burning program is well on track”.

“It has been slowed with conditions in eastern Victoria,” Mr Lapsley said.

“Gippsland has been slow because they’ve had a lot more rain, but I was in Mildura last weekend and there were burns through the Mallee and Wimmera.”

“So the program is well progressed and we’ll give aggregate targets as we get closer to the summer of what is burnt in hectares”.

But Mr Lapsley said it was more important to consider where prescribed burns took place, rather than how much land was burned.

“It’s the locations of the burns that is the critical thing … It’s not just a target on hectares it’s got to be about the areas burnt, the location and type of burn as well,” he said.

Ms Garrett also announced that the Government will spend $23 million on 47 aircraft to fight fires this summer.

Mr Lapsley said the investment ensured that Victoria had the largest firefighting air fleet in Australia.