The Department of Sustainability came under attack on the final day of the commission’s investigation into the Beechworth blaze, while senior managers were also grilled over its staffing, resources and preparation for the fires on February 7.

North East land fire area manager Peter Farrell was forced to admit that urgent threat messages for Mudgegonga, Barwidgee Creek and Stanley at 10.30pm were time-stamped 7.50pm despite the imminent danger of the fire.

That message warned of ember attack only.

Under persistent questioning he also said there was no major incident control centre established for the day nor did they have staff to run it.

Mr Farrell also said that firefighters and controllers had been sent to the Kilmore and Murrindindi fire, further depleting resources.

Jack Rush QC, counsel assisting the royal commission, asked Mr Farrell about his statement and references to website warnings.

“What I am meaning is that when we did a back trace of whether all the urgent threat messages appeared on the DSE external web, we were unable to confirm that was the case,” Mr Farrell said.

“I have been advised that messages may have been directly loaded onto the website but I can’t provide any evidence for that.”

Mr Farrell accepted the threat message of the potential for direct attack may not have gone on the website.

He was also forced to admit DSE didn’t have the resources to man the incident control centre for a major fire at Beechworth on Black Saturday.

“In the North East, basically the way we set up on that day was to make sure we had the resources in place for first attack,” Mr Farrell said.

“Secondly, that we’ve got insufficient resources to have a level 3 incident management team at every level 3 incident control centre.”

Mr Farrell said no level 3 centre was ready to operate in the Ovens district on February 7.

Level 3 is the highest DSE rating for a fire.

But he defended DSE’s initial response, even after staff had been sent to the southern fires.

“We had deployed resources from other parts of the area to those particular fires and also we still had a fire up at Corryong, the Nariel ski hut fire, so we had to maintain resources on that fire to make sure it didn’t break our control lines,” Mr Farrell said.

“(but) In my view, the district duty officer, Mr McKenzie, was able to initiate first attack, so it didn’t compromise first attack.”

The Beechworth fire on February 7 burnt 323sq km of forest and farmland, killing two people and destroying 17 homes.

Editorial — page 18