Hot Spots
1. Darling Range Regional Park: A Health Risk!
DEC’s Naturebase website makes much of its Healthy Parks: Healthy People program. It all sounds very fine, but in reality it’s just another spin job. We all know what a spin job is: the concealment of the real situation by a cloud of plausible verbiage. The regional park system is a typical example of spin. It all sounds such a good thing, but how does it square with reality?
The Darling Range Regional Park (DRRP) is supposed to provide a natural area for recreation. The DEC web site provides a lengthy list of the benefits to the community. It is also supposed to “protect biodiversity”, something that is taken by the community in general as an unquestioned good thing.
People living “among the gum trees” in the Perth Hills region no doubt support the DRRP because it means they can depend on the bush around them will stay that way, and not be developed into housing subdivisions. That’s fair enough, and it’s a very attractive place to live, but those same people do not have sufficient appreciation of the threat that the DRRP poses to their lives and property.
The basic problem is that DEC’s focus (and that of CALM before it) has always been on acquiring the real estate to incorporate into the regional park system. Their approach has been to get the land, lock it up and leave it, in line with their fundamentalist protectionist philosophy.
The DRRP is a good example of this. Virtually nothing has been done to manage it actively. The greatest failing has been to neglect fire management requirements.
Large areas of the DRRP adjoining private land carry very heavy fuels, in the range 16-19 tonnes/ha of ground litter with frequent large patches of moribund shrub species that will flare in a wildfire. Ground litter of 8 tonnes/ha is sufficient to develop a crown fire. This ensures that if a wildfire starts under even moderately severe weather conditions, heavy property losses are inevitable. There are almost no firebreaks adjoining private land. Good examples are the bush along Ryecroft Road and at the southern end of Hardey Road in Glen Forrest.
This is along Ryecroft Road February 2009, about 80 metres from houses
While the volunteer Bush Fire Brigade has done some useful prescribed burning recently along the Railway Heritage Trail, these areas in the DRRP are too large for them to handle. DEC is the only agency with the necessary resources, but has done nothing about the problem.
Hills residents should not tolerate this situation. DEC’s inaction is putting your homes and lives at risk.
* Pester the DEC office at Mundaring about the issue.
* Contact your local member of Parliament and ask him to pressure DEC to commence a program of annual prescribed burning in the DRRP that will significantly reduce the risks to householders.
* Don’t accept the status quo!
2. Why Is DEC Fire Management Inadequate?
1. Prescribed burning cycles are too long
The current fire management regime being applied to jarrah forests, in particular, results in burning cycles of 10-12 years that are too long to achieve reasonable protection against large wildfires. Previous experience has shown that areas carrying fuels older than 5 -6 years (or 8 tonnes/ha of ground litter) will carry an uncontrollable crown fire. No area of the northern jarrah forest should be carrying ground fuels greater than 8 tonnes/ha, apart from minor areas along creek lines and in refugia created by swamps and rock outcrops.
2. The annual prescribed burning target is too low
DEC has an annual target of 200,000 ha for a forest estate of about 2,500,000 ha, which gives an average burning cycle of 12 years. Despite that overall figure there are significant areas of forest carrying fuels older than 20 years. BFF believes that the negligible wildfire losses of the 1961-1985 period, where the average area burnt each year was about 300,000 ha, indicates that a figure closer to that area is necessary to provide adequate protection against major wildfires.
3. They cannot reach their annual target anyway
Since 2000, the average area of prescribed burning each year by DEC was 149,000 ha This means that in the period 2000-2008 alone, the backlog of burning was over 400,000 ha. This backlog will never be made up, so the outlook is for steadily increasing fuel loads in our forests, therefore steadily increasing fire hazards.
4. Their burn planning processes are too complex
They are governed by unproven and arbitrary rules for the protection of individual plant or animal species, while ignoring the crucial issue of protection the forest ecosystem as a whole. For example, a particular plant species in an area is selected as being sensitive to fire, requiring 5 years to set seed from germination. Using a so-called “precautionary approach” the minimum burn rotation for this area is set quite arbitrarily at twice this juvenile period, or 10 years. Such an approach is based on the flawed assumption that any prescribed burn would kill all occurrences of this plant. In practice this would never happen due to the inherent variation in fire intensity in a burn.
5. Implementation of burns is ineffective
The burning operations are carried out on individual areas of forest that are too small to provide real protection against large wildfires. The DEC objective of achieving a “fine grained mosaic” of fuel ages restricts the amount of burning that is carried out each season and greatly increases the cost/ha of prescribed burning. Furthermore, ground dwelling animals, such as kangaroos and wallabies, move into freshly burned areas within days of a burn, as many native plants rapidly produce new shoots that are keenly sought after as fodder. If only small areas are burnt at one time, the grazing pressure can be so intense as to cause excessive damage to the regrowth.
6. Smoke minimisation procedures severely limit the amount of burning close to the Metropolitan area
A political directive that DEC burning operations must ensure that no smoke at all reaches the metropolitan area severely restricts the period in which prescribed burns can be carried out within a large radius of the capital. Urban residents need to accept that some smoke over Perth is necessary during the spring burning season to avoid large wildfires during the summer. Such smoke should not be regarded as pollution, but part of the normal cycle of the seasons in Australia. DEC should be trying to educate the public to accept more smoke during the spring main burning season, but have done virtually nothing at all about it.
7. Reserves managed by DEC such as the regional parks, receive very little active fire management.
It is totally irresponsible to allow high fuel loads to exist in close proximity to peri-urban areas, yet this is happening. In the Darling Range Regional Park, for example, there are large areas carrying 16 tonnes/ha of ground fuel or more. Fuel loads over 8 tonnes/ha will carry a crown fire, so the potential for a Canberra-style disaster is here.
3. A Dunsborough Hot Spot!
The map below shows the location of houses near the popular holiday resort (and retirement centre) of Dunsborough, Western Australia. The red squares are the houses, marked on a recent aerial photograph. That the area is heavily forested is clear from the photograph. What is not apparent from the photograph is the heavy ground fuels in the area.
It is just this sort of situation where the houses, and householders, are at grave risk in the event of a wildfire under even moderately severe weather conditions. This was tragically demonstrated in Victoria in February 2009.
In addition, it can be seen that many houses are well off roads, and a fleeing householder will have to run the gauntlet of fire along narrow access tracks - a highly dangerous thing to do.
In situations like this, landholders must take the initiative to protect themselves, by arranging cooperative fuel reduction burning programs and carry out burns on a rotational basis over the whole area. Shire Councils and FESA have a duty to support such cooperative fuel reduction programs. There is no doubt whatever, that a properly organised and maintained fuel reduction program would provide good protection for householders in this area.
The design of some roads, having dead ends, is also a dangerous factor in a wildfire. In fleeing a fire in thick smoke it would be easy to become disoriented and turn the wrong way, towards the dead end, and so become trapped by the flames.
4. Another Perth Hills Hot Spot
A short drive around the Hills area will show that there are many places that would be very dangerous in a severe wildfire. Quite apart from the heavy fuel loads on many private property blocks and on the scattered blocks of forest that constitute the Darling Range Regional Park (which would support a Victorian style disaster), there are many examples of overgrown roads that would make escape from a fire almost impossible.
Here is just one example, below. It is Moola Road, Glen Forrest. You can see how heavy shrubbery grows right up to the road surface, almost touching the sides of a vehicle at one point. If this was on fire, a vehicle could not escape the flames.
The bush either side of this spot has not been burned for over 10 years. Who is responsible for maintaining the road verges in a state that would allow vehicles to escape in the event of a severe wildfire? Just now this is a death trap. It cannot be allowed to remain that way.
And there is another thing. Just look at the powerline situated down the right hand side of this same road in the photo below. At the very least, the poles will burn down, but the wires might also be melted. Not cheap to replace, not to mention the inconvenience of cessation of power for anyone living down this road (provided they survived the fire). One might expect that Western Power would have an interest in minimising the risk of damage to their infrastructure, but do they?
Each Shire Council in the Perth Hills region needs to identify dangerous places like this and commence a program to progressively eliminate them. What they really need to do is develop a comprehensive program to remove fire hazards like this. In part it will involve periodically removing the shrubbery along roads like this to enable safe escape in the event of a fire, but mainly it will involve reducing fuel loads so that the intensity of any wildfire is low, so that it can be successfully (and safely) fought.
Since there is a jumble of private and public land in the region, the Shires need to make sure that DEC plays its part in increasing the amount of burning it does on the DRRP blocks. A coordinated program is what is required. It’s up to the Shires to take the initiative. It’s their ratepayers who are at risk.