Perversely, this is actually increasing the risks exponentially as more fires are growing large, burning longer, and more often becoming uncontrollable once extreme fire weather conditions almost inevitably arise. Such has been the concern that risk avoidance fire-fighting is worsening fire outcomes that, even before last summer’s bushfires, the Institute of Foresters of Australia produced a position paper advocating the critical need to reinstate risky, but typically very effective, night-time forest fire-fighting as a standard practice.
The growing incidence of small fires being unable to be contained, even during prolonged periods of favourably mild or benign weather conditions, is exemplified by recent documented examples of large damaging conflagrations arising due to a lack of aggressive ground-based initial attack. These include Victorian fires at Harrietville (2013), Goongerah/Deddick Trail (2014) and Wye River (2015), and in Tasmania at Geeveston (2019). Collectively these four fires burnt around 290,000 hectares when they could (or should) have been restricted to perhaps a few hundred hectares or less.
In Victoria’s East Gippsland, much of the massive area burnt last summer could have been spared if four lightning strikes had been able to be contained during the mostly mild or benign weather that prevailed for a month immediately after they were ignited. Later, one of these fires was allowed to burn slowly for over two weeks in a national park without any meaningful attempt at control; and was subsequently responsible for several hundred thousand hectares of forest being severely burnt once dangerous fire weather arose. There seems to have also been similar examples in NSW, and may well have been Queensland instances as well.
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Given all this, it is staggering that the RC has not at least acknowledged the potential for improved ground-based fire-fighting to immediately mitigate the bushfire threat. Indeed, the RC’s only real concession to the need for improved fire-fighting was a recommendation to create a national aerial fire-fighting fleet that would include more and bigger water-bombing tankers. This may appease popular community sentiment manufactured mainly from theatrical media coverage, but is at odds with expert advice and perhaps represents the Royal Commission’s greatest failing.
Hard experience from the USA and Mediterranean Europe shows that greater use of large aerial water tankers substantially increases the costs of fire-fighting without any significant reduction in the incidence, extent and intensity of forest fires. On rare occasions, aerial water bombing can contain very small fires soon after they are ignited, but generally even small fires can only stay contained if there are fire-fighters on the ground. The greatest strength of aerial water bombing is in protecting houses and other built assets from fires that are threatening the urban fringe, but this is essentially treating a symptom rather than mitigating the likelihood of such fires occurring.
The greatest concern about the increased use of aerial fire-fighting is that its huge expense reduces the funding available for land management, including extensive fuel reduction works, that could significantly mitigate the extent of bushfires by making their control easier in relatively light fuels.
Internationally acclaimed, US fire historian, Stephen Pyne, has argued since the mid-1990s that the shift to greater use of expensive aircraft in lieu of land management largely explains why the US now annually endures very large forest fires that were far less common in the past. Others, including former US Forest Service National Director of Fire and Aviation Management, Jerry Williams, have also endorsed this view.
They argue that, in the US, the domination of funding for emergency bushfire response over forested land management has fostered a self-sustaining cycle of massive wildfires, which simply reinforces the dominance of emergency response by fuelling demands for greater expenditure on even more fire-fighting aircraft following each bad fire season. Recent research from Mediterranean Europe has also noted this phenomenon and refers to it as a ‘fire-fighting trap’ that enshrines a future of larger and more severe fires. Unfortunately, the Royal Commission’s recommendation for more fire-fighting aircraft is likely to ensnare Australia in the same trap.
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