Living With the Bush

 The bushfire royal commission has now discovered that, apparently, the dog ate CFA boss Russell Rees and his deputy’s homework – or, more precisely, the “mud maps” that they drew on Black Saturday have gone missing:

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On Thursday the Royal Commission was told the maps predicting the path of the fire that destroyed Kinglake had gone missing and could not be provided as evidence.

Country Fire Authority state coordinator Geoff Conway told the commission that the maps, drawn by himself and by the CFA’s chief officer Russell Rees, were the only maps which attempted to predict where the fires would burn on Black Saturday.

I think the focus on the failings of the CFA on the day remains a bit of a sideshow, but it’s not a good look.

Meanwhile, the change to land-clearing regulations allowing property owners to clear around their houses has been analyzed by a planning academic. The upshot – if the regulations are used to their full extent, “treechanger towns” and bush suburbs won’t have any trees left on them:

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Environment and planning professor Michael Buxton said new land clearing rules, intended to make properties safe from bushfire, seemingly were approved without an understanding of their potential effects.

The analysis was made from an aerial photograph of a 4.6-hectare area of Upwey and shows that of its existing 262 trees, only 12 are safe from being felled under the new rules.

Professor Buxton said he was astonished when he saw the results of the changes, which were analysed by RMIT’s mapping section.

The events of Black Saturday strongly suggest to me that we need a fundamental rethink of the way “treechanger communities” deal with the conundrum at their heart: the very trees that make them such an attractive place to live periodically make them a death trap. In Victoria alone, we’ve had a harsh lesson on this in 1983, and again in 2009. But rather than think it through properly, we seem to be deciding on an ad-hoc basis to knock down the trees.

Larvatus Prodeo 7th September 2009.

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