Originally Posted by
The Shovel
Easy fix. Pay the local Fireries to do it during the week.
In NSW, that's what Forestry Corporation and NPWS firefighters used to do before most of them were made redundant a few years ago.
Hazard reduction burning isn't a magic bullet. It helps, but the suggestion that if you HR burn everything all the time you're not going to have massive bushfires is pure idiocy. It's not going to burn all the fuel, even if you did have perfect weather and infinite manpower to safely burn everything every year (which we don't.)
When you get a bunch of wet years, followed by a bunch of dry years, this is what's going to happen. And it's going to happen more frequently with a changing climate and a warming planet.
I've been fighting fires down the south coast for much of the past two months.
We've had fire rip through spots we had back burned two days before, and the answer for this is simple physics. A crowning eucalyptus fire at 70000kW/m2 is going to burn a lot of fuel that a mild 500W/m2 backburn or HR burn isn't going to consume.
We've also had cases where burning roots and stumps left in the ground have ignited leaf matter and bark that has fallen to the ground after the previous fire has gone through, starting another one.
There was a running grass fire where fire went through the same spot twice in five days. The top of the grass burned, leaving the grass below exposed to dry out. That grass too eventually went up.