THE official fire danger period may be over but the pressure has hardly eased on Border and North East firefighting personnel.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
More than 40 burn-offs have got out of control since the fire danger period came to an official end.
It’s been just over a week since restrictions were lifted in the North East and in that short space of time, there have been up to 15 out-of-control fires in the Wodonga-based CFA region 24. Police have been called to another 10 cases in the Wangaratta-based region 23.
On the other side of the river in NSW, 17 burn-offs have got out of control since the end of the danger period on April 1.
Region 24 acting operations manager Adrian Gutsche said the numbers were “quite excessive”, with the usual number of escaped burn-offs at this time of year less than half of what’s been seen.
It’s a source of frustration for volunteers who are taken away from work commitments and their families to clean-up situations that need not have developed if the right amount of care had been applied.
In region 23, Mr Gutsche’s counterpart Mark Owens said it was another source of frustration that some land owners were not registering their burn-offs with the CFA, and were failing to meet requirements such as water availability.
Rather outstandingly to anyone that lives with a real understanding of the threat of fires in the bush, some absentee land owners make a quick trip to clean up their properties and then head back to Melbourne having not properly extinguished their fires.
There is no excuse for that kind of ignorance – it is just utterly stupid behaviour that should attract some form of punishment by law in those cases where the offender can be identified.
And then there are those that do apply the necessary caution and attention to burn-offs but then fail to notify the appropriate authorities, leading to fire crews having to attend when not required. Again, a waste of time, resources and money.
It is as if common sense escapes the minds of some people as soon as the fire danger period is said to have passed. But with dry conditions and temperatures set to nudge up towards the 30-degree mark again later this week, it is hardly what you would call a foolproof timeframe for burn-offs.
Even when care is taken, things can get out of control without the application of a bit of good old-fashioned common sense.
