Firefighters appauled parliamentry inquiry hears

Firefighters ‘appalled’ by Coonabarabran bushfire management, parliamentary inquiry hears

ABC  News – By Joanna Woodburn –

The National Parks and Wildlife Service should be stripped of its firefighting responsibilities, a volunteer firefighters group has told a parliamentary inquiry.

An Upper House committee is investigating the response to the bushfire in the Warrumbungle National Park in January last year, which burned more than 90 per cent of the park, destroyed 53 homes and killed hundreds of livestock.

Volunteer Fire Fighters Association (VFFA) president Peter Cannon told the inquiry he was “absolutely appalled at how it was managed”, saying the command structure did not work.

“We’re all basically being trained in what is required and it is a complete failure in my eyes on this fire,” he said.

Mr Cannon was asked if a single organisation should be responsible for firefighting in New South Wales.

The Rural Fire Service (RFS), NPWS and the Forestry Corporation of NSW currently share responsibility for firefighting.

“Firefighting authority should be removed from National Parks because they are not firefighters,” Mr Cannon said.

VFFA vice-president Brian Williams gave evidence about the communication between the RFS and landholders.

He said many RFS group captains in the Coonabarabran area were not initially told a fire had broken out.

“We need more local expertise to come in and assist and they would have jumped at the chance but they were out of it; they were out of the loop,” Mr Williams said.

Earlier, former silviculturist Vic Jurskis gave evidence about how parks and land should be managed to prevent major bushfires.

He said the Coonabarabran disaster showed what would happen if NPWS did not carry out fire prevention work.

“It’s not just that area. It’s any area that if you don’t graze it and/or burn the country it’ll turn into scrub, it’ll turn into a time-bomb and one day it will explode,” Mr Jurskis said.

He said he would like to see regulations simplified to facilitate rather than prevent hazard reduction.

VESTED INTERESTS IN COMMISSIONED SCIENCE ARE SQUEALING

After 175 years of returning big animal activity to the Australian high country ecology with success, stockmen are seeing some justice and equality in participating in genuine “peer reviewed science” objectivity and impartiality in returning big animals to the Wonnangatta Station and valley after 26 years of vegetation abandonment and neglect. The experiment is to observe retrieval of the vegetative chaos generated in those 26 years and therefore to run the trial elsewhere, misses the entire purpose of the scientific approach. The Academy of Science and Royal Society boffins with their rabble of environmental lobby groups in the orchid, bird watching, sale of camping gear shops do not “get the objective” of the approach. When the massive man made fires of 2002-9 were incinerating the alps in mulch lovingly deliberately accumulate for decades in the chaos of deprivation of natural processes. Megafauna activity and cool frequent fire taken away because of some foreign ideology and water profitability short term and unsustainable from an ecological view point.

A massive risk of grass and bushfire across the region has been lovingly accumulated under the blessing of bushwalking boffins bureaucrats hiding behind their law books to bring about mass extinction and destruction of the nations water supply. Wonnangatta in 1988 joined the long list of Australian grazing and forestry land taken by bushwalking boffins and bureaucrats for the management values achieved by local communities. The restoration of wildlife abundance, wildflowers, grasses ancient trees kept fire safe and well fed, the water run off clean, abundant, reliable taken for some obscure political trade off deals in public assets for swinging votes with boffins and bureaucrats getting Labour Green coalitions over the line. Kick backs of public paid bushwalking jobs over seeing doing nothing in the wilderness but watch the bonfire build from policy failure, denial and deprivation.

Government in Australia costs the people annually in the order of $20B for Federal government, $100B for state and territory governments and $10B for local councils considering themselves governments. There are 39 universities costing over $9B annually in public funding with 1+M students undergoing indoctrination at their own cost, including 6700+ PhD students with 4800 of those Australian’s. 80% of PhD’s are screened cheap labour and end their research careers after the PhD. Largely a waste of money and resources at such a massive failure rate when the activists are shutting down our industry because of work place demands for unrealistic wages and conditions, animal welfare and environmental beat ups. Australia is living on what can be dug out of the ground in raw unvalued added coal, iron ore, other minerals and energy sources. Building big houses for government bods which apparently feel no obligation to represent anyone else’s interests but their own greed and arrogance as they splash around public assets with gay abandon and no accountability as they hide among the blur of bureaucracy and boffin qualifications passing opinions outside their sphere of qualification.

Exposing the ‘great custodians of country’ myth

Wildfires on North Stradbroke Island due to lack of hazard reduction burning

North Stradbroke Island lies just off the coastline from Brisbane and is a popular tourist destination for adventurers from the mainland. With its long sandy beaches and easy surf fishing it attracts thousands of anglers each year who make the short journey from the mainland by barge.

‘Straddie’, covering 54,500 hectares is the second largest sand island in the world. Its only industries are sandmining and tourism, which support its 2000 permanent inhabitants.

On any weekend and during holiday season the beach becomes an extension to the Pacific Highway where hundreds of four wheel drives converge, turning the beaches into major thoroughfares.

Last week, due to lightning strikes, fires broke out across the tinder dry island, eventually causing some settlements to be evacuated. A lack of hazard control burning in the cooler months of the previous 10 years created the most dangerous fuel load ever seen on the island.

The Rural Fire Service had a major incident on its hands with volunteers battling kilometres long fire fronts fanned by gusty winds. Fortunately there was no loss of human life but the island’s flora and fauna copped a savage beating.

Fires with such a large fuel load burn extremely hot for a more prolonged period, in many cases far too hot for standing eucalypts and other flora to survive. Most of the island’s scorched eucalypts will sucker from the trunk and limbs rendering their function in the natural habitat as useless.

In the aftermath of the searing flames, the environmental damage is strikingly evident. Hot fires also reduce the amount of already low levels of organic nutrients thus making it more difficult for regeneration.

Brisbane ecologist Dr Greg Baxter said the island’s ecology would take at least 20 years to recover, unless of course there is another wildfire in the meantime.

A lack of seasonal rainfall is also inhibiting plant regrowth

The island is home to a large koala bear population, 59 species of birds including a large colony of glossy black cockatoos, native rats and numerous reptiles.

North Stradbroke Island ablaze with wildfires causing extreme damage to flora and fauna which according to an ecologist, will take more than 20 years to recover.

The island has been claimed by the Quandamooka and Noonuccal aboriginal groups who assist the National Parks and Wildlife Service with management of its natural resources.

Perhaps the best known of the Noonuccal clan was the late activist Kath Walker, who fought for many years to gain native title to the island for her family.

Kath was one of the last of the island’s traditional people, passing away in 1993, and it seems some of the handed-down tribal lore Kath possessed was not passed on to the present generation of island inhabitants claiming aboriginality.

This writer stood on the hustings with Kath in the early 80’s.

If Kath did pass on what she knew the message did not get through to the great ‘custodians of country’ residing on the island and mainland.

These people who claimed native title, in a similar fashion to most other ‘aboriginal’ groups, either do not know how to manage ‘country’ properly, do not care or have been prevented by the idiotic Labor Party policies of the 90’s from burning excess fuel loads each year or whenever it was deemed necessary.

Former Queensland Forestry Department practices of conducting annual or two-yearly cool fires, guarantee the damage from uncontrolled fires will be minimal and does not have a great impact on flora and fauna.

But what happened to the traditional hazard reduction burning of the open forest and grassland in the traditional August burning off period?

Did the NPWS prevent the local indigenous people from burning off in previous years? Perhaps it seems from similar lessons learnt in other indigenous controlled land or national parks, most of the old knowledge has not been passed on because the gap between the ways of the last of the traditional people of the 1920’s and the present generation is too wide.

This knowledge is lost forever. It is accepted in some anthropological circles that the lost messages from true traditional people have been supplanted by university trained anthropologists with an agenda not necessarily in the best interests of indigenous people.

Some commentators liken the beaten up stories of modern anthropologists to ‘reinventing the wheel.’

Unfortunately politicians of all hues believe it as gospel that modern day aborigines are the only capable ‘custodians of country,’ the latest fashionable coinage of the annual $25 billion aboriginal industry.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

 

This lone koala survived the wildfire which left its food source of various tree leaves and other plants a scorched, parched and devastated landscape.

Tony Keep Going – Look To The Top Of The Murray

UPPER MURRAY CATCHMENT & MURRAY BASIN REFORM

No high country forests, no Murray water inflows!

Prime Minister Tony Abbott

Alpine Ash forests across the Australian alps have been incinerated in this last decade by government adopted policy and poor advice from select boffins walking in the twilight zone among the rabid green fanaticism. More opinion than science or the wisdom of generational experience and proven performance.

People straight out of the city and university education by people straight off a boat from Europe have been very influential about how best to manage Australian forests and land. They have not understood the power of fire in the Australian ecology so have stuck their heads in the candle bark and spent lifetimes on public funding accepting policy failure reinforcing bad advice to government. Dynasties of denial are set to irreversibly destroy the Upper Murray inflows. Locked up forests repeatedly incinerated and or rendered dysfunctional to repeatedly burn under the same tyranny of mismanagement. The government inquiry after millions of hectares of alpine ecology have been killed once twice finally, bring in the same show ponies to judge their own bad advice.  Alpine ash forests and snow gum ecologies are either dead or on their way to being past regeneration because of hot fire injury.

Will Tony go far enough?

While we applaud Tony Abbots recent turn around on the Murray reform process being critically endangered lower Murray, irrigators are being sold back water confiscated by the Craig Knowles circus which excised the alps upper Murray catchment. Will Tony go all the way? The lions share of inflow was excised deceitfully from the Murray basin reform process as the tops were declared protected when in fact they are chronically neglected! The alpine upper Murray catchment rendered critically endangered by stupidity of the ‘university ski club’ accumulating mountains of dead flammable mulch, maximal scrub locked up waiting for the inevitable drought summer dry storm to incinerate the soil, the birds and animals repeatedly incinerate the vegetation so it will be beyond regeneration.

The Fictional Engineers Sourcing Brumby Slaughter

Investigations have uncovered these hidden agenda makers, without peer review, have rammed their unqualified opinions on government now set in concrete from which grew the Colong Foundation and National Parks Association pushing dogma as gospel. Our parliament of fools keep funding these  and many other snake oil peddlers, as universities teach their findings to the phD’s who now write the rules.

Alex Costin, a fellow of the academy of science, made the following statement:

“He finds it difficult to understand biology“

He also is quote as saying: “Cooma is an inbred town”

To take this so called independent report of so called management referring to the people,  they would recommend – all Australians be eradicate and reduce the boat people intake.

Bushfire Research Discredits Greens Fiction

After the 1920s, fires fed by record high fuel loads packed enough heat to penetrate cool air layers and push average maximum temperatures up by about 2 degrees. Before the deadly fire trend began in the 1920s, Observatory Hill never got into the 40s.

Research shows that super hot bushfires bring heatwaves and the appearance of Global Warming. This weather and bushfire data disprove Green claims that Global Warming is to blame for increasingly catastrophic bushfires. Scientists claiming that weather charts show global warming are ignoring vital raw data about the sequences of events. A careful look at the charts and bushfire databases in fact show that while they burn, the last 92 years of super fires can even overide the effects of natural cycles of cooling in the Southern Hemisphere. I discovered this after I lost confidence in claims to scientific expertise of Green policy that made it almost impossible to reduce fuel loads, causing so much suffering.

Green agenda had put “Mother Nature” at the helm as a de facto bushfire manager. Taking so many lives and leaving vast tracts of drought stricken dead forest, Ms Nature was proving a bit of a psycho. In my fieldwork for a PhD  in bushfire management I had already found that it can be quite mild when bushfires start, but if they can become deadly, firefronts will put out 1600 deg C across a kilometre or more so firefighters sweat like waterfalls to save homes and lives. Feeling a great sense of urgency to get the truth out to bring life and environment saving change, I delved the archives at Sydney Harbor’s Observatory Hill, one of our oldest weather stations. Conclusively, over the last 92 years, super fires burnt for a day or more before the mercury hit the 40s. Before super fires began in the 1920s, Observatory Hill never got over 38. 

Beginning at 1859, Observatory Hill’s first entry, it took me a day and a half to read through years’ of daily maximum temperatures. I listed dates it hit 40 or more and compared them with bushfire databases. Dangerous bushfires further inland were always burning a day or more before the temperature rose into the 40s.  Volumes of CSIRO research make it possible to predict that fires fed by record high fuel loads would pack enough heat to penetrate cool air layers. New levels of fuel loads burnt with new intensity because new policy changes were making it difficult to cool burn and graze. This policy was ratified by legislation in 1919 and the rash of intense fires began, fed by new accumulations of fuel. 

The graph above does not show the highest annual maximum temperatures reached, only annual averages. I could not get my computer to crunch the Excel spreadsheet of data from the Bureau of Meteorology of annual maximum temperatures from 1859 to present at Observatory Hill – too much for a MacbookPro to handle. But the Bureau of Meteorology has a powerful computer that can do annual maximum averages. The bureau will graph annual maximum temperatures for a fee and of course as a whistleblower, that is out my income range. You can see from above the annual maximum average temperature jump in the 1920s.

Another point to make which strikes a chord with the warming, Greenie, CO2 debate is that research by Phil Cheney, David Packham and Roger Underwood shows that low impact burnoffs are carbon neutral whereas post -1920s intense fires release enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere – 30% or more of Australia’s carbon emissions, depending on the amount of hot fires in a year. Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory and WA are paid to burnoff and the leaseholders (mining companies) claim carbon credits because cool burning buffers drought/heatwave/flood/storm cycles. 

Christine Finlay PhD Bushfire Management, BA Hons Disaster Management

 

GREEN TAPE PREVENTS VOLUNTEERS RURAL FIREFIGHTERS FROM REDUCING BUSHFIRE RISK

Green Fire out of control

The Volunteer Firefighters Association (VFFA), the body representing the Voice of Volunteer Rural Firefighters in NSW refutes the claim by green alarmists that climate change is the cause of the recent bushfires in New South Wales. 

It’s ridiculous to blame climate change when we know there has been far worse bushfires stretching back to the earliest days of European settlement in Australia including the Black Saturday Victoria 2009, NSW Bushfires 1994, Ash Wednesday Victoria 1983, Blue Mountains NSW 1968, Black Tuesday Hobart 1967 and Black Friday Victoria 1939, said Peter Cannon, President of the VFFA. 

The VFFA is angered by comments from the green lobby groups that tackling climate change was more important than prescribed burning of forest fuels to reduce bushfire risk. The real blame rests with the greens and their ideology as they continue to oppose and undermine our efforts to conduct hazard reduction in the cooler months and to prevent private landowners from clearing their lands to reduce bushfire risk. 

Hazard reduction is the only proven management tool rural firefighters have to reduce the intensity and spread of bushfires and this has been recognised in numerous bushfire enquires since the Stretton enquiry into the 1939 Victorian Bushfires. 

The amount of ‘green tape’ we have to go through to get a burn approved is beyond frustrating; says Peter Cannon. The VFFA is calling on the NSW State Government to reduce the amount of green tape involved in planning and conducting hazard reductions, so that our Volunteer Firefighters can get on with the job of conducting fire prevention works in the cooler months to prevent the inevitable summer bushfire disasters that are now becoming a more regular feature. 

The NSW State Government must also provide sufficient funding for bushfire hazard reduction works on a planned and sustained basis, including the creation of asset protection zones and upgrades of all fire trails in high bushfire risk areas. 

Remember that it’s far more cost effective, say around 66 to 100 times more cost efficient, to prevent wild fires through hazard reduction than it is to have reactionary fire response, which is what we have at the moment. With the great number of lost homes and decreasing property values through these wild fires, what then will the total fiscal amount be…….when it could have all been prevented by effective Hazard reduction!  

To increase the area treated by prescribed burning on bushfire prone lands from the current level of less than 1% per annum to a minimum of 5% per annum, as recommended by the Victorian Royal Commission and many leading bushfire experts. 

 

Mr. Peter Cannon
President
VFFA
Ph: 0427-697608
E: petercannon@volunteerfirefighters.org.au

www.volunteerfirefighters.org.au

VFFA……..Keeping Volunteers Informed

 

YOSEMITE INFERNO A GREEN FIRE

Result from decades of “No Serious Fuel Load Control”

The forests of America have been saved in good faith or not from the ravages of traditional cool fire, grazing animals, natural fires and forestry thinning the stands since at least 1910 in some cases if not back into the 1870s has been the policy of those European migrants wanting to put the brakes on “human exploitation” by their definitions at least. Selling access to wilderness tourist destination and researching a man made ecology chronically denied essential and natural proceses of cool frequent fire and or mixed species megafauna activity seems accepted by the boffins and bureaucrats making autocratic decisions based on opinion.

In 2014 the USA the Sierra Club and environmental activists are celebrating 50 years of the wilderness Act with over 109M hectares preserved under the Act. Non human intervention is the credo. When Europeans stumbled on America in 1492 there were an estimated 47M Indians there and had been for about 14000 years at least and arguably living sustainably across the land and assuming some megafauna, top order predator, biodiversity regulator status with their hunting farming and cool firing activities. There were an estimated 60M-100M bison, 2M bighorn sheep, 50-100M caribou, moose, elk, several species of deer, bear, coyote, wolves, mountain lion, bob cats, plenty of birds otter beaver fish in the rivers and ocean…ancient stands of sequoia fire safe for 2500-4000 years. 

The Rim Yosemite fire currently raging is said started by a wilderness weed grower now turned into an illegal hunter. Bait for emotive venting of feelings. Either scenario indicates the fuel was waiting for the combination of circumstances of ignition inevitably one dry hot summer. 

TWO STALE PARTIES and GREEN APPENDAGE

This report by Noeline Franklin should be read before you “VOTE”

Never has there been such a disillusioned audience for a Federal election. Among the personal vilification and slap stick dialogue where are the policies, leadership, national vision, selflessness for their constituents and the good of the nation? Tweedle dumb and tweedle dee, focused on their pensions salary and benefits for life they have not mentioned how youth will be employed, the elderly grey party will be catered for in their retirement, the invalid cared for, the school children, assisted with logistics of educating in a fast moving world, university students heading oversees to avoid the abominable HECS destroying ideas of professions such as doctors, dentists, nurses, large animal vets……. . A few boat loads of refugees have taken the emotive attention of the media and the people.  

Do either of these parties know there is a rural Australia out here that is not carved up for dehabited subsidised wilderness tourist destination blatantly, unashamedly buying swinging votes for a public sector well out of control harvesting public and national assets for their own agendas. Farmland is fair game for city water, city carbon off sets, water diversions, biodiversity corridors, coal mines, gas fracking, iron ore, bullet trains, highways down river flats and across farm infrastructure, confiscation for another tree planting program on crop land, government grant where school children are used as volunteer labour recruited like Hitler Youth. The grant holder gets $1 a tree to confiscate cropland declared “over cleared” by people largely unqualified to judge.  

Travel routes and farmland smothered in trees crammed in at fire danger and moisture stress proportions while forests confiscated and abandoned for national park, wilderness, city water catchment burn down billions of trees taking rural communities and towns with them. Who wants to become a volunteer fire fighter??? Your own fire insurance premiums and fire levies buying your equipment to join the folly of facing the Labour Green holocaust, conserved lovingly for decades. Oozing toxins into the city water to blend with fluoride, chloride skinning babies, the elderly for taking a bath or shower, every frog and fish species fresh water or ocean going skinned by soaps, insecticides, tannins leaching out of the cesspit of locked up forests denied the basics of care. Decades worth of toxic leaf litter rotting into the water ways tanning the insides and outsides of the people and wildlife. 

Peter Garrett, Tony Burke, Mark Butler are some of the line up Arts Law debating city based educated experts on the environment, paper tigers on grazing systems, fisheries, forest care, Murray water reform down wind and excluding the protected areas of the incinerated alps inflows of the Murray. Incinerated canopy burn excised from Murray reform because it was “protected?” In fact chronically neglected. Garrett closed down areas of CSIRO immediately after the Victorian inferno killing 173 people burning down 2000 homes incineration of millions of hectares some repeatedly 2002-9. The people of Australia denied an informed Bushfire Royal Commission on why this happened. Don’t kid yourself Australia you have an objective fearless peer reviewed scientific community observing the interests of the people. Pop Star Polly ‘sang’ to bushfire victims. Most survivors still live in caravans and leantoos. Boffins and bureaucrats environmental activists waltz off with their generous pensions. The Environmental Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act weapon of the Rio Earth Summit includes a Species Obituary List grows the endangered species captive breeding program on policy failure and deception of Hitler Youth.  

What has all this got to do with food security. High country drought aid grazing for flocks and herds has been turned into blazing of biodiversity and more junkets for universities at the ski resorts. Dynasties of boffins analysing ecological artefacts of wilderness their own concoction on the public purse. Snow is made these days on resort waste water because orographic snow and rain finds vast canopy burnt forests unattractive. The people of Australia have been denied understanding of these things because Bob Hawke closed down CSIRO Cloud Physics in 1983 because Bob wanted a mineral boom pulling Australia off the sheep’s back. Dust and fumes poured into the rain clouds over south east Australia cutting off the rain and snow. Enhancing lightening lit fires in the mountains of mulch accumulated by experts.

 

YOSEMITE INCINERATES ENVIRONMENTALISTS FAILURE

 

 Climate changing inferno heads for the Yosemite valley including the Hetchy Hetchy dam water supply to 2.6M people and emission free peak power hydroelectricity. The Hetchy Hetchy was built from 1923. For rural Australians and Americans pleading that cool fire and megafauna grazing be retained as vegetation managers and fire risk mitigation tools they are pleased to note rangers are clearing away the dogwood and white fir undergrowth turning on the sprinklers to save the 2400-4000 year old sequoia!

 

“Every wilderness tourist destination should have sprinklers installed”

 “Australia’s adoption of national park, wilderness, dingo delivered, no graze, fire suppression policies have also done us proud” !

 

Old red-neck farmers foresters and fishermen declared out there ruining a good wilderness view such scenes with mixed emotions particularly with young university educated reporters declare this is unexpected consequence of climate change and drought???! Bushfire is inevitable. Each day you prepare for it. Grazing weeding cool burning spacing the trees shrubs and minimising ground fuel. Those experts that wanted to be paid highly for doing nothing for a lifetime have left the red-necks a legacy to clean up. How long will it take to repair the soil the seed the birds lizards wildlife? The water the creeks the traumatised people the children denied candles on their birthday cakes seeing this their first fire.

Us red necks are disgusted at what experts can do to our heritage in a few years of neglect and negligence. Us dismissed as uneducated and lacking in insight and understanding. Red necks across the world want the green fraud seen for what it delivers. Muir has been good enough to die out of the road but his cult following and dynasty of believers need to declare themselves among the ranks of bureaucracy and boffins and then get out of our lives while we set about trying to recover what has been lost. 

Smokey laid bare!