I think successful litigation could entirely change the perspective on burnoffs, with several types of complainants
1) someone requiring expensive respiratory help
2) loss of property in a fire gone out of control
3) cancellation of carbon credits e.g. under the CFI program.

I seem to recall Bushfires NT recently admitting they caused a fire that damaged a site near Yuendumu. A couple of years ago a historic hut in Tasmania the 'Adamsfield Hilton' was destroyed. The parks service blamed it on lightning but by coincidence a burnoff was scheduled for the same day.

So far the fire lighters have got off scot free since they represent officialdom. If that changes perhaps it will become more professional and involve helicopters and backup crews.

It is disappointing that discussion about the value of fuel reduction burning following major bushfire events always centres on house loss as a measure of its value, and is principally used to deflect criticism of environmentalism which has typically obstructed the widespread use of the practice.

In many ways this is a 'straw man' arguement because formal proponents of prescribed burning have never claimed that it totally prevents the loss of lives and properties and have acknowledged that under extreme conditions its direct value can be minimised as weather conditions (rather than fuel levels)become the main driver of fire spread (although some experts dispute this).

However, the fact is that the concept and logic of prescribed burning as an aid to bushfire management is well established, although scientifically quantifying and formally measuring its effectiveness has been problematic (Victorian Parliamentary Environment and Natural Resources Committee, 2008, Chapter 2, p.81).

There is general agreement amongst fire researchers that light fuel loads created by recent prescribed burning are highly influential in limiting bushfire behaviour and improving controllability under ‘low’ to ‘very high’ fire danger conditions (McCarthy and Tolhurst, 1998). In the Victorian context, Tolhurst (2007) estimated that for around 95% of the time, bushfires burn under such conditions meaning that earlier prescribed burning can greatly assist the vast majority of bushfires to be quickly and safely controlled.

The fact is that this offers considerable advantages on days when 'extreme'conditions prevail because it can minimise the likelihood of there being active fires already going when such conditions arise; it can ease demands on suppression forces and so enable their efforts to be better concentrated; and it reduces the presence of loose bark and lessens spotting thereby reducing firespread.

The flip side of not doing enough prescribed burning is that a preponderance of heavy fuels can make fires burning in less than extreme conditions far more difficult to control and lead to property loss.

Both Tolhurst and Cheney have developed models using fire equations derived from experimental burning programs, and have used these models to retrospectively examine past fires which caused severe damage to assess the likely impact of various fuel management regimes on the overall impact of the fire.

Tolhurst (2007) used his Pheonix model to show that the Deans Marsh fire of Ash Wednesday 1983 which occurred almost exclusively in forests that had not been burnt for 40-years, would have been 50% smaller in area if these forests had been managed under a burning regime where 10% was being fuel reduced each year; and would have been a third smaller in area if 5% had been fuel reduced each year.

As this fire killed three people and destroyed 780 structures it is apparent that reducing its area through fuel reduction would have considerably reduced its human impacts. So, it while hazard reduction may not guarantee that life and property loss is prevented, it is highly likely to minimise it, particularly where a substantial program is in place. On the other hand, programs that treat only 1 to 2% of the forest each year (although better than nothing) are likely to have far less discernible benefit.

Controlled burning is a clumsy, ignorant way of reducing the fire risk from forest litter.

We need to ask why fuel accumulates to such an extent today when it can not have been so great in the previous thousands of years. If it had been, there would be very different forests as firestorms kill most trees, whereas less-intense fires do not. The fact is that pre-Europeans, the natural microbial decay processes were much more intense and uninterrupted than they are today, and forest litter broke down quickly, enriching the soil, stimulating vigorous growth including shade that kept the soil moist over summer. The growth also pumped respirated moisture and bacteria up into the atmosphere, with the bacteria being the optimal size to nucleate raindrops and so the summers were not as dry as they are today. Mammals and birds were part of this high-turnover ecology too, not only through their faeces and corpses, but with birds snapping off dead twigs too weak to bear their weight (sooner and a little less dry than they would fall otherwise), wallabies and bettongs transporting spores and breaking the fallen twigs again with every step; lyrebirds, choughs and others mixing the mulch through scratching. Christmas beetles consumed leaves in the weeks before the fires were otherwise due.

What do we need to do? We need to break the desiccating cycle where we can - by shredding the fallen branches into a coarse mulch to support microbial breakdown activity 365 days a year. At present the branches and fallen bark lie there drying into fire fuel. This intervention needs to continue until the natural biodegradation cycles are re-established. This will be labour intensive (but the business as usual method also has huge costs; the job creation potential is huge), but shredders can be used through forests with judicious felling of obstructing trees and their replacement by species that support a more stable and moister ecology.

In Tasmania we now have large areas of genetically engineered Eucalyptus nitens plantations whose litter does not bio-degrade readily and post-Gunns there is effectively little forestry management focus or capability.

Unfortunately, the blinkered approach by those seeking a quick fix at low cost with minimal planning, means that controlled burning - which accelerates desiccation (and incineration of small animals, and the destruction of their role in the forest ecology) - is the preferred ‘business’ solution.

The author is misquoting the report "Land Management Practices Associated with House Loss in Wildfires" when he says: "Fuel levels in the bush are very much a minor issue in mitigating property damage and human mortality from vegetation fires. An analysis of property loss in the catastrophic 2009 Victorian bushfires showed that there was no difference between being adjacent to state forest and being adjacent to a national park, despite the higher level of fuel control in the former."
The report's abstract actually states: "Significant fuel variables in a logistic regression model we selected to predict house loss were (in order of decreasing effect)....... 5.the upwind distance from houses to prescribed burning within 5 years..... All fuel treatments were more effective if undertaken closer to houses. For example, 15% fewer houses were destroyed if prescribed burning occurred at the observed minimum distance from houses (0.5 km) rather than the observed mean distance from houses (8.5 km)."
In other words, selective burning WAS effective in reducing the loss of houses to bushfire.
This is such a blatant distortion of the report that it brings into question Kirkpatrick's objectivity and honestly on all of the claims and statements made in his article.

Fuel Reduction Burning (FRB) is currently a prescribed management technique for fire prone areas of Australia. Whilst it may be effective in the short-term, can it really be a sustainable practice and if it is used on a continual basis will it really reduce the frequency and intensity of ‘bush’ fires?
Australian flora and fauna have evolved to use fire as a tool for renewal. Many Australian plants need fire in order for their seed capsules to open and to enable their seeds to be dispersed. Many areas of Australia are dry throughout most of the year, so there is not enough moisture available to enable the decay of debris, fallen branches and leaves, to occur. As a result the amount of debris continues to accumulate on top of the soil and it takes a long time for it to break down without fire.
Areas where fire occurs frequently evolve to become dry sclerophyll forests. The predominant plant family in these forests is Myrtaceae, being mainly of the genus Eucalyptus, Melaleuca, and Leptospermum. These plants contain large amounts of oil, oil that is highly flammable. These are the kinds of areas where bush fires occur extremely frequently.
If these forests are not burnt for a long time, they begin to change. In areas that have not been burnt for 300 to 500 years, the forest type becomes an open rainforest. For an area to become a closed rainforest in Australia then the frequency of fire is around every 1000 years. Hence frequent burning in order to reduce fuel, FRB, will have an adverse effect by promoting the growth of dry sclerophyll forest, which is the kind of forest that requires fire in order to rejuvenate. That is FRB will lead to the evolution of even more dry-sclerophyll forests, which is not the kind of forest desired if one wishes to reduce the incidence or intensity of fire.
The other concern about frequent fuel reduction burning is one from a horticultural or soil science perspective. This kind of burning is designed to reduce the amount of debris, especially leaf matter, on the forest floor. Hence, this reduces the amount of humus in the soil. Humus is the organic matter that allows a soil to hold moisture, so a soil with greater humus content can hold more moisture. Soils that hold more moisture are cooler in summer and are not degraded easily. If soils are moister then there is more water available for evaporation and plant growth, especially for plants other than those from dry sclerophyll forests. More evaporation also means that there is more moisture going into the air and hence the temperature will be lower. It also means moisture is available to go into making clouds, which means that there is more likelihood of a higher rainfall.
Given that frequent burning promotes forest types that require fire for survival to evolve and that frequent burning reduces the amount of organic matter available to give soils better water-holding capacity, then this kind of burning in the long run will increase the frequency and intensity of bush fires. We need to rethink our use of FRB (fuel reduction burning) as a long term fire-management tool. In order to promote forest types that are not so dependent upon fire, as well as increasing the moisture content of Australian soils the frequency of burning has to be greatly reduced. Fuel reduction burning may prove not to be a solution for long term fire management.