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!