It must be pretty nightmarish, I drove up through Benalla to Albury on Thursday and the Hume was thick with smoke and the smell of fire. I have friends with a house in Bairnsdale and they said that visibility was so poor that you couldn’t see from the front door of her house to the front gate. I live over three hundred kilometres from Gippsland, where the fires are, but the air is full of smoke, and when there is a bit of wind you can smell burning.
The areas in which the fires are burning are remote, thickly forested and mountainous, which makes it very challenging for the firefighters. There are several fires which, given the right wind direction, could join up into one massive fire front. If you want to see what it looks like: fire map
Conditions in the State are pretty dreadful, humidity is very low, many areas are in ten year drought, and temperatures are set to to go up into the high 30s today. So far the only saving grace is that the very strong north winds which were expected to come with the heat haven’t arrived, so far. But unless it rains and rains heavily, these fires won’t be out in a hurry.
And if I can hijack the thread with a particular issue. The majority of the firefighters at these fires are volunteers from the Country Fire Authority (the CFA volunteers fight fire on private land, the Govt. firefighters fight fires on public land, i.e. national parks).
While the Federal Government is promising all kinds of aid to affected communities it has, so far, refused to grapple with the economic issues for the firefighters and their employers. On Wednesday the Attorney-General (who has responsibility for the co-ordination of disaster response at a national level), was asked a question about this by the media and ducked it (again).
The agreement the volunteer emergency services (in Victoria the CFA and the State Emergency Service) have with employers allows for ten days a year where volunteers will continue to get paid for volunteering their time to attend incidents. With big fires like this, that ten days disappears pretty quickly, these fires, for example, have been burning since December 1 and will continue to burn for weeks, if not months.
This means that many of the fireies spend weeks away from their jobs, and their employers can be without some staff for extended periods of time. Firies can’t claim unemployment benefits, because, technically, they are employed, although many won’t be getting paid.
In the wake of a big fire, the economic effects for the volunteers and their employers can be devastating in communities which are already profoundly impacted by the effects of disaster and will take years to recover.
If, as some predict, we are heading into an era of bigger and more frequent disasters of this size, then it’s an issue that Governments (at State and Federal) level are going to have to be serious about, or risk losing a large portion of their emergency response ability.
