News & Views item - July  2004

 

 

Bushfires and Urban Areas in Australia. (July 8, 2004)

    On December 10, 2002 the Federal Minister for Science Peter McGauran announced new Commonwealth Government funding of $25 million for a Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (CRC). He said the Bushfire CRC would bring together experts from State based fire authorities including the NSW Rural Fire Service, the CSIRO, universities, the Bureau of Meteorology and several other organisations from around Australia to form a vital ‘fighting force’ to increase understanding of bushfires and how to control them, and added "This is the first time that our best researchers and those who undertake the ‘on the ground’ fire fighting have come together in a national effort to deal with bushfires."

 

There are 17 listed core participants, i.e. those contributing in excess of $40K cash per annum including CSIRO Divisions of Manufacturing & Infrastructure Technology, Forestry and Forest Products and Sustainable Ecosystems and an additional 10 associate participants.

 

Interesting there are no media releases from the Bushfire CRC for 2004 and under the heading publications none at all is listed.

 

Last month two researchers from Risk Frontiers–Natural Hazards Research Centre, Macquarie University, (not a Bushfire CRC participant), Keping Chen  and Professor John McAneney published in Geophysical Research Letters "Quantifying bushfire penetration into urban areas in Australia". In it they analyse aerial and satellite images of bushfire damage in Duffy, Canberra (2003), and Como-Jannali, Sydney (1994).

 

The dryly worded extract is all the more dramatic for that:

The extent and trajectory of bushfire penetration at the bushland-urban interface are quantified using data from major historical fires in Australia. We find that the maximum distance at which homes are destroyed is typically less than 700 m. The probability of home destruction emerges as a simple linear and decreasing function of distance from the bushland-urban boundary but with a variable slope that presumably depends upon fire regime and human intervention. The collective data suggest that the probability of home destruction at the forest edge is around 60%. Spatial patterns of destroyed homes display significant neighbourhood clustering. Our results provide revealing spatial evidence for estimating fire risk to properties and suggest an ember-attack model [because most of the houses were set ablaze by wind-borne embers rather than by radiant heat or direct contact with the fire].

Agreed we're in the midst of the Australian winter nevertheless, so far as we know, to date none of Australia's mass media has taken note of this work, nor has the Federal Minister for Science in any of his media releases.