Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

It’s been a good Spring for weeds, and one of those doing best around our district is Wild Oats, which is flourishing on roadsides and street reserves, along Forest Creek, and in some bush areas.

Poverty Gully water race, November 12: patches of highly flammable exotic grasses have sprung up in the 2012 fuel reduction zone.

Interestingly, wild oats has sprung up abundantly in parts of the fuel reduction zone burned in Poverty Gully by DEPI last spring. The weed is also rampant along Forest Creek, burned by DSE in 2011. This illustrates one of the complexities of the use of fire to reduce fuel: it’s not always easy to say what will come up after the fire—although clues can be found by looking at what’s there before you burn.

And here’s a question: have the fuel reduction burns actually increased fuel? Weeds like wild oats carry about six times the fuel load of native grasses like Kangaroo and Wallaby Grass—so any increase in their extent will automatically increase the fire danger.

Wild oats can be controlled by targeted use of management fire: but there’s an important matter of timing involved. Fire has to be used before the grass sets its seed—that is, in late winter. If an area is burned after that, seed in the soil causes the grass to extend its range significantly.

This point illustrates the difficulty faced by DEPI. Already, the number of days the Department can burn is limited; on top of that, if burns are too indiscriminate serious damage can be done to the seeding and breeding patterns of native flora and fauna.

It would be too easy to blame the Department entirely for the proliferation of dangerous weeds like wild oats, because they’re all over areas which haven’t been burned, like township land. But two things are clear.

First, if DEPI didn’t have to spend a lot of time burning remote areas of bushland, it could put more resources into the careful, detailed management of fire prone vegetation close to settlement—including use of methods other than fire, like slashing.

Second: DEPI is theoretically obliged by its Code of Practice and Royal Commission directive to publish the results of its burn operations, both in fuel reduction and ecological effect. It does not do this. By refusing to release details of its burn plans, and of its monitoring of burns, DEPI gives the impression that it has something to hide. If it was more transparent about its operations, people like us might be a bit less critical of them.

We’re getting tired of Government officials boasting about how much land they’ve burned: what we want to know is: has this burning made us safer?

Flammable Widl Oats, Forest Creek track, November 2013. This area was burned in 2011. DEPI’s Code says that ‘the achievement of the burn aims will be monitored and reported.’ If they were, we would have a better idea of how the Department rates its reduction burns.

The bushfire season is well and truly on for Australia,  as witness the destructive fires raging in NSW. The fires will no doubt be followed by discussion about prevention of such disasters. Readers interested in the subject could do worse than look at two articles from the website The Conversation this weekend.

The first, ‘Sydney fires caused by people and nature’, by Ross Bradstock, canvasses the bushfire problem generally—the nature of our landscapes, vegetation patterns, climate change, interaction of people and nature. It contains a good general overview of the problem. A sample passage:

‘The fires yesterday didn’t start in remote areas and move into developed areas; rather they’re actually fires that started in developed areas. For example the fire at Springwood seems to have started close to property, and similarly the fire at Lithgow.

‘These fires are a combination of natural and human factors. Without pre-empting the authorities, its likely that some of them are human-caused (directly or indirectly) rather than originating from lightning.

‘We know from spatial mapping of ignition patterns over the past few decades that most fires start close to human development or human transport corridors in the Sydney region. The way people live in the landscape now is influencing the fire regime, and that pattern is overlaid on additional natural ignitions from lightning.’

The second, ‘We know what starts fires, are we brave enough to prevent them?’ by Janet Stanley, deals more specifically with questions of prevention, in particular of arson. Here’s a representative passage:

‘Of the up to 60,000 bushfires which occur in Australia annually, it is thought that close to half of these are deliberately lit.

‘Arson is used here in a broad sense – about 30% are known or suspected to be deliberately lit; about 20% are accidental fires, often arising from reckless behaviour; and a large 42% have an unknown cause.

‘Indeed,  recorded incidents of arson have grown 2000% since 1974, doubling every eight years since 1964.’

About 40 % of arson events are caused by adolescents, Stanley claims: and a concerted effort at understanding the reasons for this would be one constructive approach to bushfire prevention. ‘Our knowledge about arson attacks and about how to prevent them is extremely poor.’

We have received a detailed response from the Department of the Environment to our submission on the 2012 Fire Operations Plan. The response can be seen here.

DEPI’s letter clarifies a number of questions we posed in our submission, but is puzzling on others. In particular, we asked how sundry burns planned for the catchments of Tarilta and Middleton Creeks would ‘complement’ recent burns in that area, which we had seen as environmentally damaging. The DEPI response makes it clear that any ‘complementing’ would be in the matter of fuel reduction only. The burns in question are all ‘Landscape Management’ [formerly ‘Ecological Management’] zones: according to the Code of Practice they are supposed to have the  triple aim of bushfire protection, ecological resilience and forest regeneration/catchment protection. Unfortunately it is only on the first of these objectives that DEPI seems able to be specific.

Secondly, the lack of useful detailed information on how burns are conducted continues to be frustrating. We are assured that ‘DEPI conducts an environmental assessment for every planned burn’: we would dearly love to see these assessments, especially for large scale burns, but none of them are public documents, in spite of the Code of Practice requirement that such information will be ‘publicly accessible’. It’s to be hoped that continued public pressure, together with more detailed enquiry by the Royal Commission Implementation Monitor, will see these documents come to light.