TERRIBLE COST OF IGNORING CLEAR WARNINGS FROM 30 YEARS AGO (Make that 80 years ago)
https://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/…/ef4fc053c2f52f62809a218… (Paywalled)
THE long-term green policy of allowing the Australian bush to be left alone to become an overgrown mass of tinder has led to the current situation.
Lives have been lost and countless animals — both farmed and native species — will die at the hands of the green agenda.
Thirty years ago, dire warnings were made by the people who had witnessed the 1939 fires in Victoria — that unless the bush was managed appropriately, Victoria would burn again.
And it is.
The restrictions placed on private land managers in preparing for the fire season and the complete lack of responsible management of public land has to be placed at someone’s feet ....
Yet governments have reacted to interest groups and have diminished fuel reduction burns or abandoned them all together.
The introduction of “risk”-based fuel reduction burns has led to excessive fuel loads in large tracts of the bush and a buffer zone is too inadequate to deal with the increased fire intensity.
A fire once started in these excessive fuel zones becomes a roaring howling beast that bears down and devours all in its path, putting our small communities at risk.
Having had the risk of lethal fuels identified by the scientists, and governments acting in the opposite direction, therefore escalates the problem.
They are either incompetent or reckless in the extreme.
The results of these poor policy decisions are now too painfully obvious with four confirmed dead and more than one million hectares burnt in uncontrolled wild fire and counting.
The cost to the community, social fabric and environmental damage is too large to calculate at this stage.
Those advocating these policies and those responsible for instigating these poor policies should be held to account. They should be charged with culpable manslaughter given the tragic loss of life that has occurred.
Workers have the right to come home safe to their families.
Residents also have the right to be safe in their homes. During this fire crisis in East Gippsland we have had neither.
• Chris Nixon is a farmer from Orbost
