I used to live on a bush block in the Dandenong ranges, I would pick up the litter and try to burn it when it was safe, during the winter. But it was too damp even on "dry" days. What often happened that one weekend it was still not burning and the next one we had serious trouble containing it. The problem doing controlled burning on large scale is that if it is burning too low temperatures it will not do much good; it will burn off bit of grass, some bark but not really reduce the fire risk or be hot enough for the seeds to crack and sprout. And when it does burn properly, it is difficult to contain if the wind picks up and/or the temperatures rise more than expected.
The temperatures created by the recent fires are far exceeding those needed for germination of some bush plants; I have visited Kinglake/Marysville area some 3 years after the Black Saturday fires, and many of the hills were still totally black = dead.
In the past we had no equipment to stop the fire, so it would burn out large tracts of the land. Now we are finding unable to stop the fires with many people on the ground, and planes and helicopters. It does not matter how they start, what is important is that they get out of hand faster, earlier in the season than before, and getting more frequent. It used to be once in so many years we had bad (really bad) fire somewhere in Australia, now we have the catastrophic fires pretty much every year and in many places.
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Voltaire: “Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” .
