FireNotes

Fire Note 88: The increasing use of the term “community” can be seen as part of an international trend in disaster management towards formally recognising the importance of community power, resilient communities and encouraging links between communities and government institutions.

However a potential difficulty with the trend towards integrating “community” into policy discourse is that the term itself often remains vague and undefined. 

This Fire Note offers a brief outline of sociological understandings of community and applies them to the context of bushfire preparedness in Australia, drawing on research conducted as part of the Bushfire CRC Extension Effective Communications: Communities and Bushfire project.
 

Fire Note 87: Bushfire CRC researchers Jim McLennan and Glenn Elliott of La Trobe University have produced a handy booklet for community bushfire safety researchers that provides a checklist of questions about household bushfire preparation activities.

Their booklet, Checklist Items For Researchers: Householder Preparations For Bushfires, is based on questions originally drafted for a survey of residents after the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday bushfires, updated, reviewed and expanded.

“The goal was to generate a manageable checklist of activities, incorporating those actions regarded by experienced community bushfire safety practitioners and researchers as sound preparation by residents of communities at-risk of bushfire attack for either staying and defending or for leaving safely,” Jim says.

The result is a 30-item research checklist which includes items related to both staying to defend and leaving safely. It can be modified for particular research purposes and can be used in paper, electronic and on-line formats.

The Checklist booklet is available here.

Fire Note 86:  A thick, tall band of grass extends across much of the middle of Australia from the Indian Ocean in the west to the Pacific Ocean in southern Queensland and the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales. The grass – waist- and even shoulder-high in places –  has flourished because of the heavy rains that accompanied the very strong La Niña event at the beginning of 2011.

With much of this grass now curing because of drier recent weather, the potential exists for above-normal bushfire activity across the centre of Australia during the 2011-12 southern fire season.

These expectations summarise the views of the attendees at the Southern Seasonal Bushfire Assessment Workshop, held in Adelaide on August 23 and 24. The workshop, supported by the Bushfire CRC, brought fire and land managers, climatologists  and meteorologists together to evaluate the upcoming season for the southern part of Australia, below the Tropic of Capricorn.

This Fire Note is produced from the discussions held at the workshop.  The full report from the workshop is available here. Fire Note issue 85, the seasonal outlook for northern Australia, was published on August 9 and is available here.

Fire Note 85:  Large areas of Northern Australia face above-normal fire potential for the 2011 fire season. The main cause of the above normal risk is strong vegetation growth in many areas fuelled by the wet weather that accompanied the very strong La Niña event of 2010-11.

In Western Australia, the Kimberley has an above-normal bushfire potential, with the fuel loads remaining significant despite increased prescribed burning across the region.

Large areas of Central Australia as well as the north-west coast of the Northern Territory can expect above-normal bushfire potential thanks to two years of above-average rainfall that has increased fuel loads and fuel continuity.

Queensland is facing above- normal fire potential over a vast area of coastal and inland areas of Central and Northern Queensland, thanks to abundant and continuous highly cured grassland.

Fire Note 83: The expanding rural-urban fringe means there is likely to be increased firefighting activity in such settings. The rural-urban interface is an environment characterised  by a more complex mixture of fuels, resulting in an increased risk of toxic products in the smoke from fires.

This Fire Note, by CSIRO research scientist Dr Fabienne Reisen,  discusses her initial research for the Bushfire CRC Extension Research Program: Occupational Health and Safety – Surge Capacity. The research project is Rural Urban Interface Air Toxics.

The project aims to identify and characterise potential hazards from exposure to air toxics while fighting bushfires at the urban-rural interface, as well as assessing the risks of exposure to fire and emergency service workers and residents.

Fire Note 82: Fire agencies and the community need to understand the limit of the law as it applies to fire planning and emergencies and to advocate for reforms to ensure that the legal system does not impose undue burdens on communities that must live with the risk of fire.

This research has reviewed the findings of post-event inquiries, judicial decisions and insurance claims to identify how law is applied to the fire ground and to determine if legal principles are an impediment to effective fire management.

This Fire Note is part of the Bushfire CRC Extension Understanding Risk research program. The lead author is Dr Michael Eburn (pictured above) of Australian National University.

Fire Note 81: This Fire Note focuses on two studies investigating the role of prescribing fluids before firefighters deploy to the fire ground and the prescription of fluids during their fire ground shift. The effect of these hydration strategies on firefighters' physiology and productivity when working to curtail the spread of bushfires is outlined and discussed.

This Fire Note is part of the Bushfire CRC Firefighter health and safety research project.

Fire Note 80:  This document provides a current overview of the key findings to date from the Bushfire CRC Firefighter health and safety research project.

Fire Note 79: Vic Jurskis and Todd Walmsley of Forests NSW collected information about  declining eucalypt stands in coastal New South Wales from the Queensland border to the Victorian border.

"Declining stands are found in areas of poorly drained or aerated soils, with pronounced changes in soil chemistry and challenged tree roots," writes Vic Jurskis in his Fire Note.  "Particular eucalypt species are associated with particular affected soils, meaning information about geology, landform and type of forest can be used to identify eucalypt forests with a predisposition to decline if managed inappropriately."

The patterns and processes described in the Fire Note are in agreement with studies conducted in Tasmania, Western Australia and elsewhere around the globe on the causes of tree decline, Vic Jurskis adds.

"These studies show the importance of prescribed burning on the nutrition and health of forests and that nutrient cycles should be an important consideration in planning a healthy fire regime."

This fire note is a companion to Fire Note 77 of May 2011, Fire Note 37 of September 2009 and Fire Note 13 of July 2007.