Bush fires

I've been looking at submissions to the Bushfires Royal Commission.

There is one from the Australian Forest Growers that makes a lot of sense. The person who wrote it is measured and careful, but the recipe for disaster comes through:

Psuedo science + Politics + Bureaucratic caution = Disaster

This recipe for disaster afflicts us in multiple spheres. To avoid the charge that I'm either right wing - or left wing - let me use three examples side by side (and try to offend everyone equally).

Example disasters
Victorian bushfires	Industrial food	Global financial crisis
Underlying ‘pseudo’ science
Environmental sciences	High input, industrial agriculture	Modern finance and risk management theory
Politics
The green vote	Cheap food	Too big to fail
Bureaucratic failure
Inaction on fuel reduction	Skewing of the regulatory system in favour of industrial food	Deregulation and self regulation of financial sector
Result
Fuel build-up leading to catastrophic fires	Local food systems are disadvantaged by an excess of caution while industrial food systems are subsidised and their externalities socialised	The profits of excessive risk taking are ‘earned’ by the finance sector – while the inevitable losses are socialised

In each case there are alternatives to the psuedo science that has come to dominate the politics - but we've exercised our democratic choices or allowed stakeholder manipulation of our democratic choices - to the point of disaster. Bureaucrats follow the politics - as, to a degree, they must.

In each case the system turns out to be more complex than we though - ahhh - complex systems again.

Dry, Dry, Dry

We're heading into another El Nino. The warnings from home are for a fire season worse than last year - at least for those areas that did not burn last February.

The Macedon Ranges (where we live) have to be at some considerable risk. The last big fire was in 1983 - and everything is bone dry. Our year to date rainfall is less than half the long term average - and this comes after a decade without an above average year!

Moora would usually be considered pretty safe. We have no long grass anywhere on the property really. We have relatively little native vegetation. Our farm house is made of non-combustible materials - and we keep it well cleared.

What concerns me is the potential for a sustained ember attack from native forests several kilometres away to our west. The media reporting from the current Royal Commission is not so great (does anyone know a good online source of discussion and analysis?), but it seems that an ember storm is one thing that is changing people's assessment of bushfire preparedness.

I'm also concerned about our tree farm at Grenville (south of Ballarat). Our tenant is about to harvest their wood chip plantation. That will mean part of the land is clear and provide some protection for our trees from our north. There are a number of houses on that side anyway - so I guess there would be a lot of effort concentrated there in the event of fire. We're vulnerable from the south and west. We will do our fire protection work - and make sure the insurance is in place and adequate.

We have another tree farm on Kangaroo Island. We had a fire burn right to our boundary in December 2007 - so I hope that gives us some protection for a few years at least.

The guy who helps us manage our forestry interests has been in plantation forestry for over 30 years - and the 2007 KI fires were the first time he saw losses of forests under his management. The cost level for insurance also suggests plantation loss is a very rare event. I trust it stays that way.

The Victorian fires - and parallels with the global financial crisis

I haven't felt much like blogging the last week.  The horrible toll of the Victorian fires has been slowly emerging - along with an understanding that this has been way outside the range of expectations for most people.

Of course there are people who are saying 'I told you so'.  And you can't really blame them when the cost has been so severe - and they did point at what seems to be the main 'avoidable' factor in all this - that of fuel load.

Australian eucalypt forests shed substantial quantities of leaves, bark and branches.  And under-stories thicken in the absence of regular fire.  This creates fuel load - which together with air temperature, air humidity and wind speed determines a fair proportion of fire risk.  Last Saturday the 3 climatic factors were 'off the scale' - and the fuel load was there to create a disaster.

Fuel load was there because of the way we manage our forests and roadsides - the result of a whole raft of public policy choices.  I observe in sadness rather than the anger of some, but I can't see how we can avoid the conclusion that our policy choices have been seriously wrong in a range of areas and that an overt, covert and bureaucratic bias against regular fuel reduction burning has been the great avoidable error.

On Friday I spoke to a friend who has farmed near Kilmore for what must be 50 years or more.  The fires started just to the east of his property.  He expressed what I have also been feeling - a fear that the 'rules' by which he (and I) have minimised our own exposure to bushfire risk have changed and that we are not as safe as we think.

If you read back to my blogs last week, you can see that I felt a reasonable level of confidence in our safety at Moora.  I have to concede to being less sure now, and that I will be a careful observer of the Royal Commission proceedings, and that I will be reviewing precautions at Moora, and that I will be adjusting what I think is reasonable in considering any other properties we might buy.

It's actually all quite like the global financial crisis.  We don't really understand what is happening.  There are those who are seen to have 'predicted it' who are now enjoying public acclaim - even when what they predicted was some different form of disaster.

It seems to me that what we need to acknowledge is that we don't know exactly what has happened and why, that while the 'guilty' should probably be punished (when we understand exactly what they did wrong), the most important thing to do is to think clearly and realistically about the future - unshackled from constructs that have clearly failed. 

Bush fires - where are they

We've been getting lots of messages from people all over the world - so this post will try to explain where we are in relation to the fires and the impact it's having on people we know.

Moora is a few km south of a town called Gisborne - 50 km from the centre of Melbourne and at about 10 o'clock (North west from Melbourne). We are just off the Calder Highway - which goes to Bendigo.

The main fires are to the east of us. One of the most serious started at Kilmore East - similar distance from Melbourne, but at 12 o'clock. It swept south from there through Wandong (5 past 12) to Whittlesea (1-00 and closer to Melbourne) and Kinglake (1-30) then on to St Andrews (2 o'clock and closer in again).

We lived just south of Kilmore for 12 years. We know many people who must be affected. Our kids went to school in Kilmore - they have many friends with family in the area. I know the area around Kilmore and Wandong well enough to be able to piece together what happened and to easily imagine the horror of it all.

Our old place hasn't burned. It would be about 5 km west and a little south of where it started. At first the winds were screaming down from the north - and pushing the fire south. Then the wind changed to the south west - and the fire was going away from Kilmore.

Although the super hot temperatures of last week and the week before have now passed, there is still a significant threat. That will last at least until we get some good rain - and that could be weeks, or even months, away. Until then, we will be concerned about Moora. That said, we actively manage it for the lowest possible fire risk. We have relatively few native trees on the farm - and almost none around the house. We have no long grass anywhere.

The worst loss of life has occurred / is occurring in areas that are heavily treed with eucalypts - which burn very readily. Eucalypt forest generally copes well with fire - it burns quickly and, provided the fuel load is not too high, it burns 'coolly'. The trouble is our forests don't burn often enough now - and fuel loads then accumulate. In a cool fire, a fire front can pass over someone in a car or house or shed, and they might (probably will) survive. In hot fires, there is too much fuel on the ground that continues to burn - and there are fewer (or no) survivors.

Personally, I would never live in or adjacent to a eucalypt forest. They may only burn catastrophically once in 30 to 50 years, but that is too often for me. I grew up in New Zealand, but within a few years of arriving in Victoria I had heard of the 1939 fires - and started to form my ideas about acceptable risk.

Thank you all for your messages of concern and goodwill. Like Pancho and Lefty - 'we need your prayers tonight'!

Bush fires update

We've been following the news from Melbourne all day.  It keeps getting worse and worse.  The death toll is now in the 80s.  

The information available on news websites is not very good - incomplete, random and and tending to the sensational.  I've been able to infer more than I can read by just watching the Sentinel website.

A screaming Age headline saying "Most tragic event in State's history" is actually a misquote.  John Brumby actually said "one of the most tragic" - and the difference is important.  Hyperbole disrespects others who have suffered in other terrible days - and adds nothing in relation to this tragedy.

No matter - our prayers are with everyone affected.  We, and our children, have many friends who have been in harm's way.  We wait to hear how they have fared.  

There is an unfortunate inevitability to bush fires in Australia.  Perhaps climate change is making it worse, but there is along history of occasional loss and tragedy that makes us all wonder whether we should live where we live, manage our environment the way we do, or be as careless about precautions for rare events.

Bush fires

The news from Australia is bad. Our part of Victoria has had the hottest day ever recorded - and, as tends to happen in such circumstances, there are serious bush fires.

It seems one of the worst fires started just east of Kilmore - the town we lived in for 12 years. It swept down on Wandong and Whittlesea before turning east and burning through to Kinglake.

We can see from a service called Sentinel Hotspots [http://sentinel.ga.gov.au/acres/sentinel/disclaimer_B.shtml] that there are presently no fires in our district. We have just been on the phone to our son - who is at Moora. It was good to talk through with Neil what he should do.

At present there are 14 reported deaths - with fears that the toll may rise to 40. From Sentinel I can see the fires sweeping north and west towards other other areas where there are many houses in vulnerable settings.

The last really serious loss of life in Victoria was on Ash Wednesday 1983. Areas close to Moora burned then. When we arrived in 2005, you could still see the signs of the level of preparedness that the previous owner thought prudent after that conflagration.

Removing the gorse and long rank grass - which we did 4 years ago - makes us much safer, but we would still have some vulnerability to grass fires.

Tonight we're praying for friends and acquaintances who may have been affected by the fires - indeed for all affected.