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VCC Bushfire Report 24-Feb-2006 At 5:41:57 PM Ronny

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Devil's Advocate?? - Two can play at that game!

The only issue here is whether to have fire breaks at all - because if you've decided to use them the size of the fire break is purely matter of working out what is the appropriate size needed to contain the fire in question. I'm sure the fire service is fine at doing that.

On the question of whether they should be there at all -

On 24/02/2006 nmonteith wrote:
>Bush Fire = Nature (or so they keep telling us)
>
>Firebreak = deliberate destruction
>
>I am just playing the devils adovcate here. The only reason they built
>those firebreaks was to protect tax-
>payers houses, businesses ect in areas bordering the National Park. They
>couldn't give a toss if the
>forest burnt and the animals got torched.

This argument contains its own answer - Fires in national parks are ok (natural occurance in a natural place). But tax-payers houses (or any houses for that matter) do not display the magic of re-growth (neither do the people who life in them). Therefore it is entirely consistent with the management of the national park as a natural environment to attempt to keep natural fires contained within aforementioned natural area.

The logical extention of My Learned Friend (if we're going to play DA's, we might as well do it right;) Neil's argument is that fires should not be contained at all. If you can't justify what is in reality a small amount of destruction to appropriately manage a fire, then you can't justify water bombers, fire trucks or anything.

I'm not even going to bother to distinguish the case of boulderer v small branches, as management of park users is pretty clearly a different issue to management of natural disasters.

I rest my case.

:)