Lessons lost in ash

Christopher Pearson | February 14, 2009

Garden waste should generally end up on autumn and winter bonfires rather than be turned into mulch. A three-bedroom house needs tanks capable of holding a couple of thousand gallons of water and petrol-driven pumps to draw on them if the power is cut off. For older people, a sprinkler system on the roof is a fairly foolproof way of protecting it, extinguishing airborne embers and wetting verges.

How many of the long-term residents of the Victorian countryside devastated by last Saturday's fires took ordinary precautions is not known. Nor is it yet known what steps the various shire councils took to offer timely advice about bushfires to newly arrived tree-changers. There's also a sense in which all this hardly matters. Because what's clear is that, even if all the normal precautions had been observed, it might not have been enough to save many of the lives lost and the buildings burned down. Some of these were not normal fires but firestorms.

Philip Cheney, the former head of the CSIRO's bushfire research unit, says that if Kinglake and Marysville had had the benefit of prescribed burning to reduce the risk of fire, the fires would have been much less intense. He estimates that in both districts there were between 35 and 50 tonnes of dry fuel per hectare, although even eight tonnes per hectare is usually considered a fire hazard. A federal parliamentary inquiry into bushfires in 2003 heard submissions that a fourfold increase in ground fuel leads to a thirteenfold increase in the heat generated by a fire. Intense heat, driven by high winds and vapourising eucalypts and pines in its path into volatile gases, creates firestorms.

It's obvious state and local government deserve most of the blame. The benefits of prescribed burning to lower fuel loads have been generally acknowledged for at least 40 years. The Bracks and Brumby governments stand accused of insufficient action to reduce fuel loads, especially on crown land and wildlife reserves, and not maintaining permanent firebreaks. They compromised public safety in the hope of ingratiating the Green vote.

Similarly, state and local planning authorities have long been aware of the dangers of building houses on top of hills with north-facing slopes prone to bushfire, but have done too little to discourage the practice. Shire councils have neglected fuel overloads on their own lands and encouraged dangerous tree-planting on house blocks, sometimes hounding through the courts prudent people who cleared more than a bare minimum of trees close to a dwelling.

Arson aside, the most perverse element in the situation is that state and local authorities seem to have been hell-bent on forgetting the lessons from previous disasters.

All these problems have been identified before, and the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983 ought to have made last Saturday unthinkable. Instead, they remind us that corporate memory in the relevant departments doesn't even extend as far back as 25 years. By way of excuse, politicians and bureaucrats tend to invoke two new stalking horses said to make Saturday's events unique: more frequent extreme weather conditions and human-induced global warming. Conveniently, neither has yet been empirically verified. We can only hope the forthcoming royal commission finds that nothing of any consequence by way of extenuation can be said about their notional contribution to the latest bushfires.

We can, however, confidently say that along with Ash Wednesday, there have been two other directly comparable precedents in living memory on Black Tuesday, 1967, and Black Friday, 1939. There's also evidence that in southeastern Australia in the pre-contact era, on Kangaroo Island, which hadn't been inhabited by Aboriginal people for a few thousand years or burned off regularly, catastrophic firestorms were fairly regular events. They serve to remind us that there is nothing terribly mysterious about the combination of tinder-dry conditions, high fuel loads, very hot weather and high winds.

Perhaps, rather than trying half-heartedly to regulate the living arrangements of tree-changers and greenies who are determined to live surrounded by forest landscapes, society should think about striking a libertarian bargain with them. State and local government could allow enclaves of them to build and plant pretty much as they choose on their own land, on the strict understanding that they are all prepared to live with the foreseeable consequences and don't expect the same level of emergency services as people in the suburbs, let alone automatic rebuilding at public expense of local infrastructure in the event of fire.

At least it would be more honest and less infantilising than the present arrangements.

Thinking of Ash Wednesday 1983, I am struck by a significant and - to my mind, at least - unwelcome change in what might for convenience sake be called the national character. Back in those days, the people facing the fires and even quite a lot of those reporting the story were more matter-of-fact about coping with disaster. In both men and women, especially among country people, there was a kind of stoicism and stiff upper lip, which was reminiscent of the tone you often find in soldiers' war diaries. People in the frontline emergency services still seem a fairly stoic and laconic bunch, but it's far less evident in the public culture.

Television is at the heart of the problem and I suspect that the rot set in during the mass hysteria following the death of princess Diana. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of people who had no idea of what she was like as a person, and were wilfully blind to the flaws in her character, were persuaded that they had lost someone they loved. The public outpourings of grief were not just unseemly and out of all proportion but downright orgiastic. And it was mostly about display: showing how keenly you felt an imaginary loss, conspicuous compassion for the commoner-turned-queen of hearts who throughout a turbulent life had done it her way. Ever since, throughout the Anglosphere, we have become a more maudlin lot, more given to tears, group-hugs and letting it all hang out.

It is much easier to make allowances for this sort of behaviour from the victims of natural disasters than from the media interviewing them, let alone politicians trying to milk the situation for all its worth. There was a lot of emotive gushing in federal parliament last week, but for my money the worst single performance came from the Liberals' Russell Broadbent, who described how he and wife Bronwyn had prepared to defend their Pakenham house. The fire shifted and the house was safe. Broadbent said in parliament: "To those that pray, I say pray now; don't leave it till next Sunday. All we can rely on is each other, and sadly, as the Prime Minister has described today, there are so many that cannot even do that."

Although a few of his colleagues maintained impassive, fixed facial expressions and cringed internally, most members on both sides of the chamber clapped approvingly when he finally sat down.

Wilson Tuckey, who is made of sterner stuff, issued a memorable press release. "I apologise to the people of Australia and particularly to those who have been directly affected by the Victorian wildfires, for my tolerance of the public policy that failed to maintain our forest estate as a safe environment. I didn't adequately prosecute the slogan: No Fuel, No Fire! My fault over the last five years is to fail to influence the Australian political establishment that certain public policy, driven by the pursuit of minor party preferences, was a recipe for disaster of the greatest possible magnitude for humanity and the forest itself.

"Worse, as the evidence I provided parliament on November 27, 2003 in the enclosed tabling speech ... demonstrates, I knew better."