Page 176 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 15 February 2006
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strategic areas and to ensure that the works undertaken provide the most effective means to reduce this risk.
A critical component of this work is to ensure that across the territory there are strategic areas surrounding properties and assets from which firefighters and residents can protect their homes. To achieve this, 2,300 hectares in over 250 separate locations in the ACT have been slashed this season to manage grassland fuels. This work has been undertaken around the urban interface adjacent to critical assets and back fences of properties, as well as along rural and arterial roads. In many of these areas grass has been cut many times over the spring and summer.
It is a totally unrealistic expectation that every blade of grass behind every ACT fence will be slashed on a continuing basis through the summer. This is simply impractical. However, the strategic bushfire management plan and bushfire operational plans ensure that all urban edge areas of the territory that are vulnerable to bushfire are identified and treated according to their level of risk and vulnerability. A total of 550 kilometres of urban interface is managed in this way.
It is also inevitable that there will be areas where the long grass or other bushfire hazards cannot be fully cleared due to rocky or steep slopes that prevent the safe use of mechanical slashers. The land managers, either by reshaping the land or using hand tools or burning, are systematically reducing hazards in these difficult areas. This critical slashing work has been complemented by the prescribed burning of grassland areas and roadsides to provide strategic breaks across the landscape. This is the first time in many years that this burning has been undertaken in the ACT and it not only provides increased protection but is a critical means of training our firefighters.
Over 130 kilometres of fire trails have been maintained or upgraded in the last six months. Most of this work has occurred in the more remote forested areas in the ACT and is critical to providing the best opportunity to suppress fires. Large fires such as those in January 2003 start in these areas and it is imperative that resources are spread effectively, to manage not just the current bushfire season but those seasons that are to come. The government takes a long-term strategic and landscape level view of the bushfire threat based on a sound historical understanding of fire behaviour. There is far more to bushfire management than just managing grass at the back fence.
Given that a huge percentage of homes in the 2003 fires were lost to ember attack from fires that were hundreds of metres away, Mr Pratt’s preoccupation with grass behind the back fence displays little, if any, understanding of bushfires and bushfire behaviour. The loss of the Yarralumla townhouses was a consequence of brush fencing catching alight and spreading. The grass behind those brush fences had been slashed two weeks prior.
I want to make one point very strongly. In his simplistic way, Mr Pratt has written to members of the public informing them, based on no expertise, that he thinks their homes are at risk. What is appalling is that he is suggesting that if long grass were cut then fires would not come through. What Mr Pratt fails to acknowledge is that the grass behind residences in Yarralumla had very recently been cut when a fire came through and damaged properties. What he is doing is creating an expectation in the community that if the government pours more and more money into slashing and mowing there will be no fires.
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