5/1/14 RFD - Kosciuszko State Park - Black Perry -Yarrangobilly caves

Spent the morning in Tumut learning about the Rural Fire Service, the primarily volunteer fire brigades responsible for most bushfire firefighting in New South Wales.  There are about 70,000 volunteers across NSW, according to Ian Stewart, District Manager for the Riverine Highlands, with about 1700 on the books in his area. Managing a large group of volunteers is challenging and there are about 700 available at any given time to go immediately to a fire if needed.  

Ian Stewart, RFS, talks with Juan from Mexico

Stewart said they are facing new challenges with the volunteer corp that is traditionally drawn from farmers in a community that are willing on help on fires when it is their land that is threatened.  However, the numbers of family farms are dwindling, the farmers are an average of mid 50's and the next generation of children is moving to urban areas for work. They are working to bring firefighting into high schools to try and get younger people interested and adopting a more flexible plan - people can move in an out of a fire brigade throughout their lives as they wish.

The RFS supports volunteers with several levels of training depending on how much training they want to take and where they work.  And safety of fire crews has become a priority after the Black Saturday fires in 2009. Stewart says now the approach looks at danger to firefighters before actually worrying about putting the fires out. That was not true prior to the fires in 2009. They do talk about risk assessment but don't have any formal procedure for doing that kind of assessment.

Blowering Lake - there are Emus there by the lake!

Funding was a very interesting concept.  The RFS is funding about 11% from local government, another 12 or so percent from state government, but 70% of the funding comes from the Insurance Council.  Also interesting, Stewart says they have reactive and proactive fire fighting.  Reactive is responding to a call to help.  Proactive is when he goes into a community he talks about shared responsibility.  Like in the states, people call the fire department and expect that they will come with a truck and put it out. Stewart tells them "well I have expectations as well that YOU will take steps to protect your own property."  They do have laws supporting that but its still in process.

Park scenery

A huge thing was called ICON. This is a web-based system for reporting all fire information - every call, every response, everything.  And its all public instantly.  Stewart says before he does anything else in responding to a fire he is required to put the information on ICON which ensures that all the public knows, and more importantly all the government and higher ups know the moment a response is happening. The idea is they don't wait till they have all the information and do a more formal statement about it.  Its more like every dispatch call is out there publicly right away.  ICON and everyone who works on it, which can be upwards of 150 people, is based in Sydney.  Their job is to assess all the public conversation via social media and what people are saying with what is coming across ICON and manage all that. Fascinating.

Charlie at Blowering Nursery

Went to Blowering Nursery as well.  Some 8000 to 10,000 seedlings a year produced here.  This is Charlie, one of the Foresters with the Forest Corporation.  Not exactly sure about Forest Corporation but its a quasi public private venture for managing the pine plantations. 

Blowering Nursery is within Kosciuszko State Park which is huge.  After the nursery we went to Black Perry lookout which looks over an area of the Park which is designated wilderness.  

Ranger Matt White 

Matt White the Ranger who met us there described their definition of "wilderness" as a place where you can't do anything fun at all!  No motorcycles, no 4 wheelers, no camping, nothing fun at all!   He was showing us a prescribed fire he had completed a short time ago and talked about balancing the aboriginal history of the place and the biodiversity needs which complicate such burning. 
 There is a rock here called Black Perry which was formed 

The view from Black Perry Lookout

from Limestone and lava and that process produced gemstones.  In this case, garnets and another stone I can't remember. But there is only one other place in the world where that stone is found so he also had to protect this big rock.  It was beautiful but quite foliage dense.  This is an area where the aboriginal people used to migrate to gather these giant moths that they ate.  Still protected for that reason as well as many others.

Picnic at a public campsite

We finally saw a lot of kangaroos and Emus today!  Tons of them up in a sort of high alpine looking area around Blowering Lake.  I couldn't get pictures with my phone but others did and I'll post them later.  Then we stopped at a public camping area to have some lunch. They've provided a nice picnic each day. 

Then we went on to Yarrangobilly Caves. We didn't get to go in the caves but Ian Dicker, at the right here,  talked about the difficulty of protecting the millions of summer visitors in an area should a fire occur. He is standing in front of the Cave House which they are renovating for visitors.  He says they used to think they could put people in the caves to protect them from fires, but discovered the large opening combined with the exit hole and a slight upward slope made for a nice funnel for heat and smoke! So they have a new plan and have done a lot of defensible space work.

Ed Hiatt

The rest of the day was spent driving in the mountains looking at various of burn scars and regenerated foliage.  The Eucalypse prove very challenging for fire control.  One of the main higher elevation species, the ribbon gum, has the very stringy hanging bark that we all recognize as a eucalyptus tree.  But the problem is that the strips curl and make these 6 or 7 foot long tubes that are easily filled with air and lifted.  Its not usual for them to fly, carrying fire, for several kilometers. Ian said one hit his helicopter windshield!

Left is Ed Hiatt from our group holding one of the long curled ribbons from the ribbon gum tree and to the right, others of the group looking at the fuels.  Pretty dense on the ground as well as hanging from the trees.

Standing dead Alpine Ash from 2003

We moved on heading toward Jindabyne where we spent last night and came across an area that was killed in the 2003 fires. The standing dead trees at left are Alpine Ash.  It's a significant fire issue because they need to protect the new trees growing underneath from any new fires as they need 25 to 30 years to produce seeds.  But the standing dead are a significant snag hazard for firefighters as you can imagine. So fighting fire there is a complicated decision about what trumps what.

So that's some of the day.  Off to another presentation this morning, Thursday, followed by the beginning of the International Symposium on Bushfire back in Canberra, and a formal reception late this afternoon so we gotta get our "smart casual" duds on.  That's semi-formal apparently!

4/30/14 ACT - Stromlo - Brindabellas - Tumut

An amazingly packed day yesterday. Still catching up on the change in time. Its why I'm writing this at 4 am instead of last night!

Stromlo Fire Depot in Canberra

 Learned a great deal about fire in the ACT yesterday.  Should explain ACT stands for Australian Capitol Territory. Is a long sliver of land, excised out of New South Wales, sort of like the District of Columbia is inside of, but separate from, Washington.  It's the seat of government for NSW and where all the embassies and Parliament and national museums and such are. All the land is owned by the government - private people can lease land for up to 99 years but don't own it - and the ACT has its own Forest Fire agency. ACT has about 400,000 people. ACT Parks manages 73% of the land and there is high urban interface because most of the people live within 30 min of ACT lands

Study group in Canberra

In 2003, 70% of the ACT burned in a giant fire when 4 smaller fires burned together and our visit yesterday focused on what happened,what they learned and what changed after that fire.  Before 2003, the ACT spent maybe $40,000 a year on fire.  Didn't pay much attention, didn't do much to prepare or even worry about it. Much has changed now - millions are spent on preparedness and planning.

You do have to understand that while ACT parks is the fire manager for the land, the rely on the Rural Fire Department volunteers to actually do fire supression.  Reminds me a bit of Texas with the reliance on the volunteers.  And there are the same concerns we have, are the volunteer fire brigades as well trained as they should be?  One of the rural fire brigades is an ACT group so they are involved in suppression but mostly they are the land manager.  And then it is Fire and Rescue that provides structure protection, but not usually under Unified Command.  Its more like, the IMT has a place for ever agency that needs to play but just as a member of the IMT. Anyway, a lot more about that but there were some interesting things learned in 2003.

Their challenges should sound familiar: climate change; balancing urban development with biodiversity and fire; fire protection balanced with ecosystem management; indigenous engagement and managing water catchments or watersheds.  Ever heard that before?!

ACT Parks Fire Planner Dylan Kendall spelled out the changes they have made.  Rather complicated but basically they are doing more strategic planning.  They have a Strategic Bushfire Management Plan (SBMP) and  all other plans must be managed in accordance with the SBMP. It has many parts: Objectives, preparedness, response, community action plans and government action plans.  Under the SBMP, they have a Bushfire Operations Plan (BOP) that is done annually, last one financial year and allocates money and resources to complete actions in a given year.  There are problems - it only looks out a year and does look at how one year relates to another. So they introduced a Regional Fire Plan which looks out 10 years, are map based, are landscape in scale and put all the BOPs in context.

Interesting facts I thought.  They maintain helipads/spots at all times.  They decided how far people could walk (1500 km) and they build helipads all over within that distance for use taking things in or out and they are maintained at all times.  So during a fire they don't have to build them.

They have very creative ways to manage the balance/conflict between fire management and biodiversity and they worked out a graph to decide the rules about managing biodiversity and burning, and when they would bend the rules or how they would do a trade off. Like us they had a lot of pressure after 2003 to do prescribed burning so show the community they were protecting them, but at the same time, everything had burned and they needed to "not burn" to let the vegetation regenerate. Caused a lot of debate about what trumps what.

They have the same smoke issues we do - some under stand the need, some don't.  Everyone hates the smoke.

The public is consulted about the strategic and regional fire plans but not the BOPs.  They value and use local knowledge but want to remain out of the day to day debate,s so this works.

Amazingly, they have passed laws regarding urban design standards and construction.  It's the law if you build in the WUI you must use certain material and designs that meet fire standards. And developers of subdivisions have laws about how they design urban areas in fire prone areas.

And they are increasing "urban resilience" meaning they teach communities to take care of themselves and defend their own property because they recognize they cannot be at every house.  They also provide the equipment and training to help communities do that.

Lastly,  the greatest thing since sliced bread!  They took a look at the IAP and thought about what firefighters REALLY did with it.  Usually grabbed the map they needed, scribbled the DIVS phone number and radio frequencies on it and took that one page and put it in their pocket!  So they made a one page IAP! It has all the critical info and that's what the crews get.

After spending our morning at Stromlo Fire Depot to hear about the CAT we drove up past some prescribed burns and learned about vegetation here.  Mostly Eucalpyse varieties.  Ribbon Gum, Snow gum and peppermint trees, some of the 500 varieties of Eucalypse.  Had lunch on top of a mountain near an old fire and learned about that fire.  Saw a wallabye and some wombat holes!  Drove way up high to a fire tower and met Charlie who told us about pine plantations that are managed by the ACT.  They are government plantations.  And then down to the community of Tumut where we spent the night.

Today, Wednesday, we are headed up in elevation again.  Not exactly sure where but we may encounter snow!!  Meeting amazing people and having quite the adventure.

4/29/14 Bus tour of Brindabellas

We had a lovely morning at the Stromlo Fire depot and learned a great deal about how the Australian Capitol Territory operates in regard to fire. More on that later. Headed up the Brindabells and found a prescribed fire!

4/29/14 Headed up to the Brindabells

 Everyone finally got some sleep so we are headed out this morning for our first adventure. Wait, the first adventure was this morning.! The stuff is truly awful. Like salty something rotten!

4/28/14 Made it to Australia!

All the 2014 Wildland Fire Study Tour participants survived the
14.5 hour flight and here are waiting for the last flight to Canberra.

Well, we all made it to LAX from across the country to catch our flight to Sydney! The 14.5 hour flight was really, really long but we all survived with varying amounts of sleep.  We skipped Sunday and arrived Monday morning the 28th and then waited a few hours for our next flight to Canberra.

We were picked up in Canberra by our hosts one (whose name escapes me due to lack of sleep) was the head of their equivalent of the NWCG,  Andrew who will be our tour guide for the rest of the trip, and Neil Cooper (whose job escapes me now).

That's Neil to the right, on the right, talking with our fearless leader Jason Steinmetz on the bus that took us to the Australian National University where we stayed the first day.


To the right is our first view of Australia as we flew out of Sydney.  Those weird shapes are the way the prop showed up on the phone camera!  Very fall like here, all the trees gold and red.  But a very nice 60 or 65 degrees.

Not to much to report.  We got to our rooms about 12 noon Oz time.  The rest of the day we spent trying not to fall asleep.  We walked around outside, went to see some museums, walked around the beautiful lake that is the center of Canberra and tried to stay awake till dinner at 5:30 so we could get in sync with the time zone. Got to know some of our fellow fire peeps.  Juan is from Mexico, Jalisco to be exact, and is like an FMO for the equivalent of a state agency, since Jalisco is like one of our states.  I believe he called it the State Forestry Commission?

During our walk we saw some, well bizarre architecture like this little brick and steel structure to the left.  Not sure what that was all about.  Perhaps it was art!   And the building to the right.  Those are large planters of some sort hanging off the sides of the building.

Otherwise, just some minor adjustments.  Only some people's phones work. Not mine.  Had to learn how to operate the room heat and lights (you have to put your room key in the thermostat mechanism on the wall! Never would have figured that out. Got our first "biscuits" on the plane - cookies which I'm sure many of you know. So not much hard news to report as we are just focusing on arriving and staying awake at the moment. But everyone has been very nice, and its beautiful.  Looking forward to tomorrows ride up into the Brindabelles (SP?) the mountains to look at a fuels treatment and some other efforts.  So more when we find wifi again.

National Social Media Training Next December

At the request of the State of Massachusetts, I am working on a 3 or 4 day social media training that is tentatively planned for the first week in December.  NIMO has agreed to help with the cost of live streaming the training to anyone in the country that would like to participate and we are whittling down the agenda and instructors, etc.

I am interested in anyone's thoughts about what ought to be be included.  We have, of course, many "how to" sessions on specific tools, and a segment on social media strategies for IMTs.  But we also want to include processes such as: how often should one engage, how do you get more information from Operations, what do you do about negative comments, can you delete rude or offensive comment , what should you talk about and who should be allowed to post.

Any other ideas?  Things we should include?  Please feel free to comment here and let me know.

Thanks

Kris Eriksen
Public Information Officer
NIMO

Welcome!!

I am so thrilled to see NIMO using a new medium to communicate ideas, share stories and lessons learned and simply opening the doors of communication to further our mission. Using the blog is easy, and I encourage all NIMO employees to contribute.

I expect that once this starts getting used, each of you will find that you know more about what is going on across the organization and once the 2015 work groups discover how easy and useful this tool is, you will likely want to look at using this method for communicating and brainstorming.

Be open to the possibilities and enjoy!!

Robin Cole, NIMO Coordinator