Con
I tend to agree with your conclusion, but have a few other
scomments.
The key point is surely that if an expert assessment of the
question "Do we have enough kit to stop this if it gets
towards 'out of control'?" gives the answer "No." the correct
response is to stop the burn. I suspect that in many cases
the response arrived at is more along the lines of "We don't
get many opportunities to do this so 'She'll be right.'" and
the box of Redheads is produced.
It would be very interesting to know
what proportion of fires are started by various means. While
arson and lightning strikes are other obvious sources there
have been a number of recent examples in which the term
"controlled burn" has been a contender for oxymoron of the
year. For some reason the States' Rural Fire Services and
Parks Services never put out consolidated information about
this (and anything that happened more than a week ago is not
going to get media coverage).
I also think the response from
the Manager is pathetic. He obviously has done no follow up
to assess what damage was done, but just relied on the COG
group to tell him there still some birds around. How that
got translated into "...bird life is abounding
..." is bewildering. I
have come across other comments recently along the lines of
everyone in NSW Government is terrified of losing their job if
they say the wrong thing.
Martin
