Summertime, and the living is …?

Burning issues, Part 2.

Hot dry winds and a total fireban a week ago were a reminder that with the official onset of summer, the living may not be easy as we would like it to be.

The return of La Nina has brought welcome rains to large parts of the Centre, and given our heroic and exhausted firefighters a much-deserved break from the horrors of the past three months.

But as Bushfires NT’s Grant Allan demonstrated in his recent talk Seeing Through the Smoke, certainty is in short supply in the big picture of climate in Central Australia. Are we ready for anything the summer can throw at us?

The Weather Bureau has declared that better than average rains are “likely’ over the next few months, but how much will fall and exactly where and when is guesswork.

“Whether we will get sufficient rain to have fires reburn in areas that were burnt is going to be very much dependent on the patterning of the rainfall and the landscape,” Grant said, pointing to an area of the Simpson Desert that burned in January – and then again after only eight months.

Although 40 per cent of the southern NT area has burned, that leaves a lot, including “large areas around Alice Springs” that is yet to go up – and with fresh rain the fuel load is increasing .

Parts of the south-west that have burned, meanwhile, have had high rainfalls and “are shifting from that intermediate state of recovery into higher fuel loads”, increasing the likelihood of fire in the south next year.

For some who have watched big rains, big droughts and big fires come and go, the 2011 situation demands a shift in consciousness about fire and its place in the desert.

“We need to develop a constant awareness that fire is a reality in our land, just like flies, dust and heat,” says Temple Bar Station’s Rod Cramer.

From his own lifetime experience he knows we have a way to get there and this year’s events illustrate just how far.

Last month the new chairman of the Bushfires Council Paul Blore outlined several ways in which the Government had shortchanged Bushfires NT, leaving it it unprepared for the intensity that was widely anticipated.

The ABC Rural’s website includes a frank interview with Blore. To quote from the accompanying article:

Council chairman Paul Blore says six positions with Bushfires NT weren’t filled in time and equipment was lacking.”They had nothing to fight it with. Even a drip-torch, a quad bike, a grader or a grass-fire unit, they had a lack of resources,” he said.

“And also a lack of resources on the properties, they weren’t prepared for that as well.

“There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on. It’s caught everyone out.”

There appear to have been numerous other issues than those outlined in the ABC report. Some reflected an ongoing lack of immediate readiness (see questions at the end of this article)  but others reveal a complacency that is almost structural in nature.

Take the railway corridor, for a start, says Rod Cramer. The pastoral estate has been saddled with the responsibility of fencing the eighteen hundred kilometres of railway line running through the Territory, to keep stock out of the corridor.

The NT Government has paid for the fencing, but left pastoralists with the responsibility of keeping a firebreak along their side of the fence.

On the other side of the fence, meanwhile, the owners of the railways have been exempted from having to install a firebreak – thus creating what Rod describes as a “three thousand kilometre-long wick” from Adelaide to Darwin.

Already this fire season there’s been extensive damage to fences along and across the corridor where fires like this one picture have burned.

Meanwhile a similar situation applies along Northern Territory roadways.

In the past, says Cramer, the Bushfires Council actively created firebreaks on either side of roadways, but the practice has been abandoned.

It seems to just one sign of the Government’s paring-down of fire management to the minimum level, with the focus on waiting for an emergency to engage crisis management.

Another area in which major progress could be made is under-resourced: aerial burning. This tool has only been added to Bushfires NT’s southern kit in the past three years, but as Grant Allan demonstrated has proved amazingly effective in creative prescriptive fires in the western MacDonnell Ranges and the Tanami Desert.

Aerial burning gives firefighters a degree of control, direction and safety that’s simply not possible on the ground, especially if fires are already burning.

Aerial burning is heavily resourced in the Top End, where strategic burns began ten years ago. “Ten years later, with a big input of funds and resources and people, it looks like spaghetti up there now,” Grant said, referring to aerial burning lines.

“And that’s what’s making a change. It’s getting a lot more people engaged and involved. They’ve sorted out the funding issues. We’ve got to look for opportunities and ways of doing the same thing.

“The thing to remember is that  one small corner of the Tanami is still 50 per cent bigger than this region here (Arnhem) … so the challenges are very real.”

With an unpredictable season ahead , I put the following questions to NRETAS last Monday, after conversations with firefighters and pastoralists. I am still waiting for a reply.

• What were the department’s advance preparations for dealing with what was widely tipped to be one of the Centre’s worst bushfire seasons on record?

• How does the Department allowing for the fact that the owners of the railway are exempt from having to create a firebreak on either side of the railway, while pastoralists have been required to fence their property alongside the railway and create firebreaks on their side of the fence? If the railway is not required to create its own firebreaks, shouldn’t the Government be doing so, given that the railway corridor is also subject to fires and those fires are vulnerable to spreading a long way north and south?

• Can you confirm that a loader fitted with a stick rake was provided by the Government for Bushfires Central Australia a few years ago, but that it recently sat for many months in Tennant Creek unused because Bushfires NT didn’t have the money to transport it to Alice Springs where it could have been a valuable and effective tool in creating preventative firebreaks on southern properties as promised?

• Has the number of staff at Bushfires Central Australia been cut since the 2002 fires?

• Did a decrease in the resources available to Bushfires Central Australia lead to a decision to abandon its previous practice of creating firebreaks along the side of NT highways road reserves?

• Can you confirm that the new grader that was supplied by the Government for this bushfires season has yet to be engaged, and as recently as last week was still being fitted with radios, lights and a spare wheel carrier? Is it true that only there is only one person qualified to operate the grader?

• Is it true that vehicles set down from Darwin could not communicate by radio with local bushfire teams because the radio frequencies had not been adjusted accordingly?

• Following meetings after the 2002 fires which recognised the need for firefighters to have a common radio frequency, did the department ensure that all the teams involved in firefighting operations eg Bushfires NT, Parks & Wildlife, Town Fire Brigade in Central Australia can now communicate with each other by common radio?

• Does the department need to allot more resources to aerial burning programs?

• How is the department encouraging and assisting landholders to avoid large and dangerous bushfires such as have occurred in the last three months in Central Australia?

- Dave Richards (series to be continued)