No Fuel = No Fires
Our Honorary Member Dr Chris Back is very well credentialed to talk about bushfires - what the Americans call wildfires. Chris was invited to become the CEO of the WA Bushfires Board after many years as Chief Quokka on Rotto. He had a big job to do. The Bushfires Board was in disarray, their hundreds of volunteers had lost confidence in their Board and strongly felt that outside of their local community, no-one one cared about them or the job they volunteered to do to protect the properties in their shire. They even joked about how the Board responded to major bushfires - the DEAD process.
D = Disaster
E = Enquiry into the Disaster
A = Apathy, no-one did anything about the enquiry recommendations
D = yet another Disaster
Chris and several others well credentialed citizens formalised the current prescribed burning plan that now exists in WA, but not in some other states like Victoria.
This graph tells the story - comparing bushfires in Victoria (red triangles) and WA (blue dots) according to the amount of prescribed burning that was carried out before the bush dried out after the winter rain.
Climate Change is one reason for the bushfires we experience each year, but Chris emphasised it is NOT the only reason we have more major fires each year. If you ban prescribed burning, there is a build up of fuel on the bush floor. And banning prescribed burning is what some local councils have been persuaded to do - for ‘environmental’ reasons, or because they have a fear of a controlled burn getting out of control.
One of the jobs Chris did was persuading local councils to stay focussed on reducing most of the fuel on the forest floor before the late Spring when “dry lightning” thunder storms might ignite a fire - but if there was little or no fuel, there would not be a major fire, and it could be controlled by the local Bush Fire Brigade.
Finally, turning his attention to the recent California Wildfires, Chris asked us to look at this graph - the upper half of the landmass shown is Southern California, and lower half is Baja California in Mexico - Mexico starts just south of the big red patch. The colours indicate how old the vegetation is - the red bits are less than a year old, which suggests there was a fire only a year ago. No prescribed burning in Southern California, no codes relating to building materials and tree and garden plantations.
WHY? It’s already smoggy enough without using prescribed burns to make the air even more difficult to breathe!
