30/07/2026
We are proudly associated with the high standards of forestry practices within NSW. For decades, we have contributed to maintaining forest health, providing forest access, emergency fire services and wood resources. Unmanaged forests can become fire hazards. A great read!
"When Firefighting Forgot How to Fight Fire"
Victoria experienced a couple of big fires in the summer just gone, and as the state awaits the report from yet another inquiry, I am reminded of a contemporary fire management problem that concerns me greatly.
Each time Victoria burns, the language is familiar. Press conferences follow a script of unprecedented conditions, extreme fire behaviour and forces of nature beyond human control. Aerial footage loops behind ministers and senior officials as they praise bravery, promise reviews and reassure communities that everything possible is being done.
But the outcome is increasingly predictable. Large fires now run for weeks or months. They expand across reserves and declared wilderness areas, burn with high intensity across vast tracts of forest and leave behind landscapes stripped not only of trees but of habitat, seed banks and ecological resilience. These are no longer short, sharp emergencies. They are campaign fires managed rather than stopped and endured rather than defeated.
What is rarely asked is why this has become the norm. Victoria did not suddenly become fire-prone this century. Nor did fire behaviour only recently become “dangerous”. Forests burned last century under severe weather, long droughts and extreme winds. What differed was not the climate alone, but how fire was confronted. It was early, decisive and with confidence born of experience.
Small fires were treated as urgent threats, not future problems to be monitored. Rapid initial attack was the default. Crews were mobile and well trained, supported by machinery that could be deployed quickly to construct containment lines. Firefighters worked with the landscape and used time to their advantage, particularly at night when conditions moderated and control was achievable before severe weather arrived.
In many cases, fires were stopped before the worst conditions ever materialised. That is the main reason why we had much fewer catastrophic fires last century.
This professional judgement was exercised by people who understood fuels, terrain and fire behaviour because they had spent their working lives in the forest. Their knowledge was earned, not modelled and it was passed on. As a new firefighter myself many years ago, I was fortunate to learn under pressure from those who had seen fires succeed and fail and who knew when to push and when to hold. Sadly, that system has largely disappeared.
Today, fire management is dominated by centralised control structures where strategic decisions are made far from the fire edge by emergency controllers who often lack deep, long-term forest firefighting experience. Authority has shifted away from local judgement toward procedure, risk frameworks and organisational defensibility to suit their political masters.
The justification is invariably safety. Firefighter safety is, rightly, paramount. But we rarely question what has changed so fundamentally that practices once considered effective, controlled and professionally acceptable are now deemed too unsafe to attempt?
Forests have not become unknowable. Fire behaviour has not become inexplicable. What has changed is how risk is defined, who is permitted to assume it and how responsibility is framed when fires escape control.
In practice, “safety first” too often translates into inaction during the early stages of a fire, which is precisely when decisive intervention matters most. Machinery is held back. Night operations and backburning are avoided. Crews are delayed or repositioned while fires grow unchecked. By the time conditions deteriorate, the window has closed.
At that point, the narrative shifts. What was once a containable fire becomes a “natural disaster”. Responsibility dissolves into weather and climate, while the consequences are borne by communities, ecosystems and future fire seasons.
These outcomes are not hypothetical, they are happening. During the 2003 bushfires around Canberra, fires that started by lightning in nearby state forest were attacked immediately, with crews and machinery deployed and containment achieved quickly. Those fires did not threaten the city.
At the same time, four fires burning in adjoining national parks were monitored rather than actively suppressed during their early stages. Over the following days they expanded, merged and ultimately coalesced into the firestorm that struck Canberra’s western suburbs eight days later, destroying more than 500 homes. Weather played a role, but the decisive difference lay in early operational response in the early days under less catastrophic weather, not conditions alone.
A similar pattern emerged at Wye River in December 2015. The fire began late in the afternoon under mild conditions. Crews were on scene quickly and a dozer commenced a containment line. Firefighters were available to assist with edge work and patrol.
As day was turning into night, they were directed not to engage. Crews remained largely inactive and no detailed reconnaissance was undertaken to assess fire behaviour or containment opportunities. The reason given was safety. In the days that followed, the fire escaped control and six days later more than 100 houses were destroyed on Christmas Day. The risk that prevented early action did not disappear because it returned later at far greater scale.
In Warrumbungle National Park, a fire started late in the afternoon the day before severe fire weather was forecast in January 2013. However, crews were not pre-positioned or on stand-by, arrival was delayed and continued night operations were assessed as unsafe even though conditions were favourable to contain the very small fire.
The following day, with a total fire ban and severe fire weather in place, a backburn was authorised mid-morning. Predictably, control was lost shortly after ignition. Most of the park burned, adjoining homes and fencing were destroyed and the park’s visitor centre was lost. No public accounting followed that reconciled the contrasting risk assessments applied before and during the event.
From these examples, the pattern is consistent. Early, lower-risk opportunities to contain fires were declined, while higher-risk decisions were taken later when options had narrowed and consequences were far greater. When outcomes proved catastrophic, explanations focused on weather rather than on early decision-making. When there is no accountability, the same mistakes keep occurring.
Nowhere is this more evident than in reserved and so-called wilderness areas, where access tracks have been closed, fuel loads allowed to accumulate and active management progressively withdrawn. These landscapes have not been returned to a benign natural state.
Fires that once could have been checked with aggressive ground tactics are now allowed to develop into high-intensity conflagrations that burn for months and destroy everything in their path, including the biodiversity they were supposedly protected to preserve.
The decline of professional forest management has compounded the problem. As forestry agencies have been dismantled, so too has the cadre of skilled workers who understood these landscapes year-round. Prescribed burning, once regarded as essential preparation, has been sidelined and institutional memory has thinned or disappeared.
In its place, a heavy reliance is now placed on volunteers. These are people of immense commitment, but often without deep forest fire experience. Many are most effective in open, familiar country. Too often, they are deployed into complex forest environments only to wait, redeploy or stand down under distant command.
Meanwhile, the public is shown a spectacle. Aircraft dominate the imagery, which is dramatic, reassuring and politically defensible. Aerial firefighting has a role, but it has become a substitute for early ground action rather than a complement to it. Aeroplanes never have and never can put out and contain fires by themselves. We need containment lines on the ground and people mopping up and patrolling for escaping embers.
And so the cycle repeats. Victoria now faces a choice. It can continue to explain ever-larger fires as unavoidable acts of nature, or it can confront the uncomfortable reality that many disastrous outcomes are shaped by early decisions not taken. Re-empowering experienced ground leadership, restoring access and fuel management and treating small fires as problems to be solved, not risks to be deferred, would not eliminate fire. But they would reduce its scale, duration and damage.
The real question is not whether fire is dangerous, because it always has been. The question is whether Victoria (and the rest of Australia) is willing to relearn how to fight a bushfire before the next opportunity is lost.
Photo - Tatters ✾ from Brisbane, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
