A burning question

As parts of Australia recover from a spate of severe bushfires, debate is raging over how they can be better controlled in future, writes David Fickling
The bushfires came to Melbourne today in a more gentle manner than usual. No firestorms raging close to suburban streets and houses reduced to ash - just a sooty cloud that drifted down from the mountains and hung over the city for the day.

For Australians, this counts as a quiet period for bushfires. Tens of thousands of hectares of national park may be disappearing in smoke, but few people are under direct threat. The national park recovers; homes don't.

But in the lull between backyard infernos, battle has been rejoined on the contentious issue of what is causing the bushfires, and how they can be stopped.

Environmentalists are pitted against a growing body of scientists who say the only way to limit the blazes is to set the bush on fire during the winter months. "There's this misunderstanding of the nature of fire," said Phil Cheney, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). "Most people still don't accept that it's a natural ecological phenomenon, and until we do that we're not going to be able to prevent these out-of-control fires."

Australian species such as the eucalyptus and banksia often require the passage of bushfires to allow their seeds to germinate, and the characteristic bark-shedding of eucalypts is believed to have evolved to provide tinder on the forest floor.

But John Connor, campaigns director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, disagrees that burnoffs on national park land are the answer. "Of course you need some sort of burning close to houses, but then every summer we hear these people who just want to concrete over the place," he says.

Bushfires may be natural, he says, but the sort of forest management needed to prevent risk to property is definitely not. "A lot of native plants can survive maybe three fires in 20 years, but more often than that and you'll end up with nothing but eucalypts in the forest," he said.

Environmentalists believe the real concern around the fires should be the indication they give of the coming impact of global warming - a view backed up by greenhouse experts such as Ian Noble, formerly of the Australian National University.

But so far there is little reliable information to indicate whether fires have in fact been getting worse, and many scientists, such as Jim Gould of the CSIRO's bushfire behaviour and management centre, say that there hasn't even been an increase.

"More and more people are living in the bushland, and they expect the same level of protection as if they lived in the city," he said. "So you hear a lot more about the fires because there's more people living cheek-by-jowl with the fire areas."

The urban areas of Sydney and Melbourne have doubled since 1960, and - particularly in Sydney - much of the development has been in long arms stretching deep into the bush country.

The three areas worst affected by the fires that hit Sydney before Christmas were all on the bush fringes and had seen a massive influx of city-dwellers in recent years, keen to escape the inner city and enjoy the pleasures of the bush.

Phil Cheney says there has been no measurable change in the incidence of fires since the 1960s, when he remembers flying 600km (373 miles) between Bega, near the Victorian border, and Newcastle, north of Sydney, and seeing only two breaks in the continuous fire front.

"The provision of an implicit guarantee of protection from the emergency services has meant that people are moving into these dangerous areas and are not taking any of the precautions which they should be taking," he says.

Many dwellers on the bush fringe choose to make the most of their new location by planting gardens using flammable native plants, rather than the more retardant imported species, and building homes on the tops of ridges to enjoy the views of bushland. These last are a particular fire risk, as winds can fan fireballs up the steep wooded slopes and consume the houses on top with breathtaking speed.

Meeka Bailey of the New South Wales rural fire service says that new planning rules passed in New South Wales in August should make some difference, but will do little to improve the situation in areas which have already been built up.

"People need to put space between their houses and the forest, keep away from the higher areas and clear out dry undergrowth from their gardens, otherwise it will only encourage the fires," she said.

Sydney has traditionally been particularly badly hit by the fires, because areas of bushland penetrate almost to the heart of the urban area. In the 1994 fires, one blaze in the Lane Cove national park almost reached the waters of Sydney harbour.

The proximity of large urban areas certainly makes a difference to how seriously bushfires are taken. Two blazes in the Victorian alps were only discovered today after examination of satellite images, and massive infernos in the sparsely-populated Northern Territory were all but ignored until last month, when government officials pointed out that they had already consumed 150,000sq km - an area larger than England.