Spot on, required reading for all concerned. Some responses to points made in media debate:

1. Which is the greater threat to biodiversity - controlled hazard reduction burning or the megafires fuelled by its absence? Obvious.

2. It seems that many bushfire victims have been through a number of fires, and that fire hazard levels in Victoria might be rising. Rather than rebuilding homes in situ as promised by Rudd, the Federal and state governments might consider offering assistance to home-losers to build in less disaster-prone areas.

3. Re training the army to fight fires: the purpose of our armed forces is the defence and security of the nation. All military training should be aimed to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of the forces in combat; anything else detracts from this. If our fire-fighting forces are inadequate, this should be addressed directly.

When I had a hilly, forested 38 acres, I undertook hazard-reduction burning on much of the block while maintaining corridors for wildlife. When a bushfire sprang from boys playing in a waste-dump, no surface life survived in the non-reduced areas - no plants, no insects - but the cleared area below the house saved it.

Roger, you and your very knowledgeable fellows have been trying to get this message across for the past sixty odd years. Ever since the Royal Commission into the 1939 fires, the same message has gone out, "Fuel reduction with mosaic burning", and it is still being either ignored or resisted. Without this measure we will continue to get these horrendous crown fire which no man or machine can stop and which also produce numerous spot fires many kilometres from the main fire.

Of course we are always going to get fires in the bush. Every time a dry thunderstorm goes through we have the potential for a fire to start in some inaccessible place where immediate response is impossible, and the current lack of fire tracks or real fire breaks in public lands exacerbates the problem.

Finally, we need to build houses more suited to the environment and improve the area around these houses so that the option of stay and fight is better than the one of flee, in which so many perish because they leave too late. All houses in the country or in the bush need to have a 30,000 litre concrete tank attached to an engine driven fire pump so that they can effectively stay and fight when it becomes necessary.

Keep up the good work, Roger.

David

I might also add, "Beware of the ABC and the members of the nutty media".

See http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/001633.html

Jennifer Marohasy is well known for her in depth expose of some of these cranks.

David

For the life of me I don't understand why people who buy bush blocks with a little home nestled among the gum trees move in with a bulldozer to reduce the ground on their quarter acre block surrounding their house to bare mineral earth. Do they think they can survive a fire if their neighbours are surrounded by native bush? If every one cleared the bush to back to park like surroundings it would be like living in the suburbs.

Why does David Packham want to live in the bush, if he wants it converted to suburbs like Wantirna or Narre Warren.

Likewise the family that built in the bush then cleared all the trees off their block to create a fire break - why build in Nillumbuk with all its tree covenants when there is plenty of open land at Mickleham, Donnybrook - 10 minutes west. There isn't much forested bush land left near Melbourne.

Whilst we are still coming to grips with the Victorian tragedy it seems that Roger's article gives hope to how best to effectively deal with future bushfires and their causes.

It is worth considering that the Parliament of Victoria’s 2008 Inquiry into the Impact of Public Land Management Practices on Bushfires in Victoria found the state has experienced over 34 significant fires since 1851 with approximately 2/3rds of these fires occurring since the 1950s. On average, Victoria experiences over 600 bushfires every year on public land with lightning and arson accounting for over half of these fires.

Major findings from this inquiry included
Finding 3.1:
The bushfires of 2002/03 and 2006/07 were of a scale, intensity and frequency which resulted in an immediate and severe impact on Victoria’s biodiversity.
Finding 3.2:
The scale and intensity of the 2002/03 and 2006/07 bushfires were the result of inappropriate fire regimes, and in particular, of an insufficient level of landscape-scale prescribed burning.
Finding 3.3:
An increase in prescribed burning across the landscape, … in a manner which mimics natural fire regimes, represents the most appropriate strategy for minimising the immediate and long-term threats to biodiversity from large and intense bushfires.
Finding 5.2:
That the reduction in the extent of timber harvesting on public land and associated loss of local knowledge and expertise, machinery available for fire prevention and suppression, and a decline in the number and accessibility of vehicle access tracks has had a negative impact on land and fire management, particularly the bushfire suppression capacity of relevant agencies.

Yet there has been a demand for limiting fuel reduction burning on public land and the end of industrial forest harvesting in native forests. Sections of the community have expressed alarm at the loss of biodiversity and the smoke from prescribed burning and the construction of access roads in our forests.

Whilst our immediate thoughts are with the victims, the firefighters and those providing emergency reponse , we need to also act in the long term to help reduce the impact of bushfires such as those witnessed on 7th February this year in Victoria.

As farmers our property is north of Perth 250 K's over the Darling Ranges which seemingly comfy and close to the city for retiremnt, has similar problems to the high sloping heavily wooded country of the potential firestorm lands in Victoria.

Travelling to Perth in the New Year if we could afford a holidsy, in a summer such as this we would some years see many homes burnt out, and wondered why highly inflammable monster eucalypts now bare and blackened had been standing so close to homesteads and sheds.

As wheat farmers with highly inflammable stubble still left in our padoocks near after harvest, we certainly had to make sure our homesteads and sheds were always well cleared of any dry grass and especially only to leave just one or two tall eucalypts to give that stupid potentially dangerous appeal that any old cockie knows about.

Of course, nobody ever listens much to loud-mouth cockies similar to me who now hangs out in Mandurah.

Pity they didn't because our stupid governments by putting a ban on too much clearing in semi-sightseeing venues creates a potential death knell like has happened in our ranges and as certainly tragically came about in Victoria.

While we are sympathetic, certainly we are allowed to declare that silly buggers is not only related to hill's residents, but even more to governments.