Australia Archives - Page 47 of 53

Report issued about escaped prescribed fire in Western Australia

Bill GabbertMarch 4, 2012October 13, 2012UncategorizedAustralia, escaped prescribed fire, prescribed fire, Western Australia

A report recently released about an escaped prescribed fire in Western Australia said some employees of the Department of Environment and Conservation are overworked and are performing above their skill levels. The prescribed fire in Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park escaped on November 23, 2011 and pushed by strong winds, destroyed 40 structures and burned over 8,400 acres. Residents who had refused to evacuate later had to take refuge from the fire on a beach. They were rescued by jet ski and ferried to a search and rescue boat offshore.

Here are some excerpts from an article at www.watoday.com.au

…The damning report by former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty, released [February 23], found DEC made a series of omissions and mistakes during the planning and implementation of a prescribed burn that led to devastating consequences.

More than 40 properties were destroyed or damaged when the burn became out of control and raged across 3400 hectares.

Rather than pointing the blame on any individual, Mr Keelty said the errors that led to the bushfire were made by people making decisions beyond their expertise and using the available resources.

“Many officers are required to make decisions affecting the lives and livelihood of the community which, on the face of it, do not match their pay scale,” the report says.

The union representing most DEC employees, the Community and Public Sector Union, claims the poor resources at DEC have forced some employees to work in excessive of 36 hours without a break and many others to regularly work 20 hours.

When they finished their ordinary day job with the department they were then on-call in case of a bushfire outside of hours.

“They’ll go home and be on-call to manage a fire incident, whether it’s small or big,” state secretary Toni Walkington said.

“They’ll spend whatever amount of hours that it takes and then they’ll report back the next day and do their parks and services job. So they don’t get breaks and that’s because DEC isn’t funded to have more people in those fire roles.”

Ms Walkington said their jobs also were made more difficult because of a lack of technology, including no electronic operational processes, meaning staff still had to do paperwork by hand.

They were also reluctant to put themselves on the on-call roster or take responsibility for fires because some employees had been publicly named and identified during the Margaret River inquiry.

“The spotlight is on them and criticisms have been made,” Ms Walkington said.

August-Margaret River Shire Mayor Ray Colyer said DEC employees now feared walking the street in their work uniforms following community outrage over the department’s failure to contain the prescribed burn.

Thanks go out to Dick

“Fatal flaws” in Aussie Stay-or-Go bushfire strategy

Bill GabbertFebruary 16, 2012December 23, 2014UncategorizedAustralia, Black Saturday, evacuation, Victoria

Some of the 172 people that died in the Black Saturday bushfires in the Australian state of Victoria in 2009 made a conscious decision to stay at home, rather than evacuate. The Stay-or-Go option that has been used in Victoria for years did not turn out well during the extreme fire behavior on Black Saturday.

Here is an excerpt from an article in The Australian:

…According to geographers Saffron O’Neill of Melbourne University and John Handmer with RMIT University, the state’s fire preparedness strategies must be “transformed” or the next “complex” bushfire will cost far more than Black Saturday’s 172 lives and $3.5 billion in damage.

According to Professor Handmer and Dr O’Neill, most people who died in the fires left the decision to leave their homes too late or had fire plans containing “fatal flaws” — such as sheltering in a bathroom or other small room — where they were unaware of what was happening to the rest of the house and had no way to escape when the house caught fire.

“This is not a small step or a small change,” said Professor Handmer of the vulnerabilities he and Dr O’Neill detail today in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

“We are the victims of our own success,” said Dr Handmer, noting that strategies for preparing for and coping with ordinary bushfires were totally inadequate in the face of hot, fast-moving wildfires.

The researchers recommend policymakers focus on four areas: diminishing the hazard — for instance, by altering electrical power distribution systems; reducing the exposure of infrastructure and buildings by prohibiting housing in high-hazard areas; reducing the vulnerability of people — by, for example, identifying disabled people; and boosting the adaptive capacity of institutions such as insurers and firefighters.

Thanks go out to Dick

Elephants and rhinoceroses for fire prevention?

Bill GabbertFebruary 3, 2012October 13, 2012UncategorizedAustralia, Tasmania

A scientist in Australia has proposed that elephants and rhinoceroses be used in the Northern Territory of the country to reduce the intensity of wildfires. According to David Bowman, an environmental scientist at the University of Tasmania, this introduced exotic species would help control another introduced exotic species, gamba grass.

Gamba grass was brought into the country from Africa in the 1930s for cattle ranchers who said it produced more feed for livestock than native grasses. Since then the grass has spread across a large portion of Australia’s Northern Territory and burns very intensely. When gamba grass matures, it becomes tall and woody and is undesirable by cattle or native species like kangaroos. But back in Africa, elephants and rhinoceroses love the grass. Mr. Bowman thinks elephants and rhinos would reduce the grass enough to slow the spread and intensity of wildfires.

Australia is already spending millions of dollars to control the spread of other introduced species like camels and water buffaloes.

Mr. Bowman said rhinos and elephants could be sterilized so they could not reproduce, and they could be restricted by fences and tracked with radio collars.

What could possibly go wrong?

Fire channelling — a danger to firefighters

Bill GabbertJanuary 30, 2012October 13, 2012UncategorizedAustralia, open access, research, weather1 Comment

The rapid escalation of a small fire due to fire channelling can result in a catastrophic decay in both firefighter and community safety that is counterintuitive.

That is how the authors of a paper wrapped up their findings about a weather phenomenon that can cause a wildfire to spread in unexpected directions. “Fire channelling” can force a fire on the lee side of a ridge to spread 90-degrees from the general wind direction. For example, if a west wind pushes a fire across a north-south ridge, on the lee or east side of the ridge the fire could spread to both the north and the south, counterintuitively.

Fire Channeling fig 11 — The white arrow shows the general wind direction. The black area was not imaged by the line-scanner on this run. From the Sharples, McRae, and Wilkes paper funded by the Australian government.

Generally a strong wind has the most effect on the direction of spread of a fire — more so than topography or fuel. If a fire is spreading with a strong west wind, the rate of spread on the flanks, the north and south sides, will be much less than the head of the fire on the east side. Unless — fire channelling is occurring.

Firefighters usually face less risk when they attack a fire on the heel or flanks of a fire. In most cases it can be impossible to safely attack the head of a fast-moving fire in heavy fuels. But this fire channelling phenomenon has the potential to present firefighters with unexpected fire behavior, putting them in a dangerous situation on what they expected to be the flanks of a fire that suddenly converted to heads of the fire.

The authors of the paper, which is titled Wind–terrain effects on the propagation of wildfires in rugged terrain: fire channelling, considered several causes of fire channelling, including thermally induced winds, pressure-driven channelling, forced channelling, and downward momentum transport, but they settled on wind–terrain–fire interactions as the most likely mechanism driving the atypical spread. Here is an excerpt providing some details about wind–terrain–fire interactions:

…If a fire happened to spread into a region affected by a separation eddy, then the hot gas from the fire could be entrained within the eddy, with the strong wind shear at the top of the eddy impeding mixing between the synoptic and separated flows. Hence, supposing a fire enters a region of separated flow at the north end of a slope or valley, and treating the air within the eddy as a quasi-isolated system (i.e. a system that involves only limited mixing with the surrounding environment; cf. Byron-Scott 1990), the air within the northern part of the eddy will be at a higher temperature and pressure than the air within the southern part of the eddy. As a consequence, the air within the eddy will tend to move towards the south in response to the thermally induced pressure gradient or simply owing to thermal expansion of the air within the eddy. Based on the available evidence, such an interaction constitutes the most likely mechanism driving the atypical spread.

Access to the research

If you want to read the paper you will have to pay CSIRO Publishing $25, in spite of the fact that the authors appear to be funded by the Australian government. It was written by Jason J. Sharples, Richard H. D. McRae, and Stephen R. Wilkes who are associated with three organizations in Australia, the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, and the ACT Emergency Services Agency.

This is another example of government funded research that taxpayers have to pay for twice. Once when the government-paid employees conduct the research and write the paper, and a second time if a person wants to read it. We have written about this lack of Open Access numerous times before. However, this example is a little murky, in that the government sponsored research was published by CSIRO, a governmental body. But many U.S. wildfire researchers who are government employees publish their papers in the same CSIRO publication, the International Journal of Wildland Fire, behind a pay wall.

Sign the petition

At the U.S. White House web site you can sign a petition to make government funded research available at no additional charge to the public. Let President Obama know that you oppose HR3699, the Research Works Act, which is an attempt to put federally funded scientific information behind pay-walls and confer the ownership of the information to a private entity. You will need to register at the site, giving them a name and a real email address.

Poll: Most significant wildfire stories of 2011

Bill GabbertJanuary 16, 2012November 13, 2019UncategorizedAustralia, poll3 Comments

Vote on the most significant wildfire stories of 2011.

2011 was a busy wildfire year in some areas of the United States. In Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, it was extremely busy, in fact several records were set for the largest fires in recorded history and number of acres burned.

DC10 dropping — Tanker-911, a DC 10 airtanker, drops retardant on the Wallow fire above Greer, AZ; the Del Rosa Hotshots wait in a safety zone and watch the drop, June 11, 2011. USFS photo by Kari Greer

As we did for 2009 and 2010, we are conducting a poll, allowing our readers to determine which were the most significant wildfire events of 2011. We sifted through the 641 articles we wrote in 2011 and compiled the list below which includes a short description of each of the nominated topics. Below the list is the poll. The line of duty fatalities are not listed. While they are very significant of course, we don’t want to try to rank them, one over the other.

By the way, you can still vote, if you have not already, in the 2009 and 2010 polls.

Nominations for the most significant wildfire stories of 2011

January 13: Director of college fire program arrested. Retired Chief Jerry Austin was arrested for stealing $500,000 from students in the Fire Technology progam at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California, east of Los Angeles.

February 7: Bushfires in Western Australia burn 64 homes.

April 30: Georgia swamp fire burns 309,000 acres. Honey Prairie fire in Georgia starts, eventually burns 309,000 acres in Georgia and Florida. In the December 15, 2011 update on InciWeb it was listed at only 76% contained.

May 15: Northern Alberta fire burns 400+ homes. Fire burns 40% of the homes, over 400, in the northern Alberta town of Slave Lake.

May 29: Wallow fire largest in Arizona history. It burned 538,049 acres and destroyed 32 residences.

June 13: USFS management of the air tanker fleet. This has been an onging story for years but came close to making it into the mainstream on June 12 when the Washington Post wrote an article titled “Firefighting planes have perhaps been too long on job”. At that time there were 18 large air tankers on exclusive use contracts. By late summer there were only 11, compared with 44 in 2002.

June 26: Las Conchas fire largest fire in New Mexico history. It burned 43,000 acres in the first 14 hours, ultimately blackened 156,593 acres, and burned 63 residences.

July 5: Nine USFS firefighters injured in crash. Nine U. S. Forest Service firefighters were injured when their crew carrier crashed in southern California

July 6: CAL FIRE budget cuts. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection suffered a $34 million budget reduction resulting in 730 fewer seasonal firefighters, reducing engine staffing from four to three, and cancelling the exclusive use contract with the DC-10 air tanker.

August 15: Aero Union closes their doors. Aero Union which owned 8 large P3 air tankers comprising 42% of the U.S. large air tanker fleet shut down after the U.S. Forest Service cancelled their contract saying certain required safety inspections were not completed. This left 11 large air tankers, down from 44 in 2002.

September 5: Fires in Texas. This was a year-long event due to drought, but especially notable were the fires on Labor Day weekend in Travis and Bastrop counties which burned over 1,600 homes.

September 12: Pagami Creek fire in Minnesota. After burning about 130 acres while being monitored for 12 days, the fire took off under strong winds and burned 92,000 acres, costing over $22.3 million to suppress.

October 5: Three engine burnovers on same day in South Dakota. On three separate fires on the same windy day, three engines and their crews were burned over by wildfires. At least four firefighters suffered burn injuries.

November 7: Santa Maria air tanker base to reopen. After almost 3 years of controversy and criticism over the 2009 closing of the Santa Maria air tanker base near Santa Barbara, California, the Forest Supervisor of the Los Padres National Forest decided to staff it again.

November 12: Congressman Rehberg drops suit against fire department. Facing an election for the U.S. Senate, congressman Denny Rehberg dropped his lawsuit against the Billings, MT fire department in which he sought monetary reimbursement for a wildfire that burned some undeveloped land owned by the congressman and his wife.

December 1: USFS to contract for 7 to 35 “next generation” air tankers. The U.S. Forest Service issued a request for proposals for “new generation air tankers”, saying they may contract for 7 to 35 turbine-powered large air tankers over the next several years.

Choose THREE

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Aussies hope to shock residents into evacuating before it is too late

Bill GabbertNovember 28, 2011October 13, 2012UncategorizedAustralia, evacuation3 Comments

The Victoria state government in Australia has introduced some videos that are intended to shock residents into evacuating before the approach of a bushfire makes it too late. The videos feature audio recordings of people panicking as bushfires approach their homes