 12 million acres burning in Australia. The Queensland fires, they are bad. Estimates over 14 million acres. They are horrific. Give it farmers from clearing their own land. It's too dangerous to burn. It's global warming, it's global warming. Unnested know-how for length. Prime Minister has declared any length. The aboriginals, they were very aware of the dangers of corning. Greening thousands of years, getting to know that landscape. Connecting to that landscape. Over the top restriction. And the clearing isn't working. The break we're going to light up off today is Katang break. This is a priority for the state, is to keep plan burning happening. So this is the biggest problem with doing our hazard reduction burns. You've really got to try and get the weather right. It's got to be not too hot, not a lot of wind, still a little bit of humidity. Because we don't want to rip and roar and fire going through here. We just want it to nice steadily go through. The drought factor as well, are all factors in which we take into account when we're doing the plan burn. And so if all of those tick the right boxes, we know that we're going to have a lovely result like this. Plan burning is undertaken for a variety of reasons. Hazard reduction is just one of them. We also use plan burns to maintain ecological processes, to manage weeds, and to manage pests. The point of the burn is to remove the understory fuel layer. And so that means that if a wildfire comes in later on, it's not going to have that fuel on the understory. And therefore it's going to have a lot less chance of actually getting up into the pop story and taking off. There's three main factors that influence the fire behaviour, the fuel, the weather and the topography. The fuel is the only thing that we can influence out of that fire triangle. It doesn't really matter if it all doesn't burn out. They get a 60% burn. I think that's about all they're asking for in this block, which will give it a good mosaic pattern. There's all these mosaic burns and pathways for animals to escape and survive. You can see where we burnt previously, just a couple of weeks ago. Now it's cleared the country beautifully and it also prevents large bushfires in the wet because you now have a mosaic pattern. It doesn't guarantee fire won't pass through there, but when it comes back through, rather than it being a raging fire with 30 meters flame height, it's much more manageable. As you can see on the bottom of all our trees here, we've got very little scorch. If the fire goes through too hot, it encourages a lot of the bad weeds, so the antennas and all that sort of stuff to come back kills off all the smaller trees. So just this nice steady fire is exactly what they're after. We work alongside and with the farmers, the pastures, the airports, the mines, et cetera. The whole landscape's changed through industrialisation and western colonisation, so how do you do that safely where there's all these other interests and infrastructures that didn't exist with just simply traditional burning? It's highly complex, and even though it's our bread and butter and Qfish's bread and butter, it's a highly complex interaction between forests and fuel, weather, the climate. And all we're about with these all these firemen, we've trained over the mainstream rural firemen. These farmers are quite skilled in what they do. Rural firemen are going very highly skilled blokes, very committed. All we do is add a few tricks and tools to their tool bag. We utilise lots of other mechanisms, planning controls, subdivision design, house design, access, maintenance, all of those other issues also help reduce the likelihood of house loss during bush fires. But by itself, planned burning is not going to be the silver bullet. So if the weather's not right, we just can't get the burns done. Now, weather conditions have to be right and favourable to do the burns. And if they're not, they're not going to like the match. It's going to be a loser has a reduction burn. There's been some really good analysis done by Dr David Jones from the Bureau of Meteorology who's looked back at the weather observations for Queensland over the last 68 years. And that analysis has indicated that there's been a general warming trend across Queensland, and particularly in South East Queensland, an increase in both the severity of the fire season but also the duration of the fire seasons. Going back to last season, we actually had our first observation of catastrophic fire day durations in Queensland. And we also had quite a prolonged fire season, not just this season, but also the previous one as well. From a firefighter's point of view, it's a fair thing to say we've had more bad fire weather days in recent years than we have in the past. And that's a very challenging thing. And also the worst of the days have been worse than anything we've recorded before. Just got to the stands all the way. This is all we got. It's no good. We were in some streets in town there, and the embri-tac was going two streets over. We had a strong prevailing north-westerly wind. So it was basically pushing the fire directly for the western side of Standthorpe Town. Backyards were catching on fire. Frontyards were catching on fire away from where the fire was. And it was so unpredictable because the wind just kept swirling. It kept changing. When the fire front travelled through, it hit an existing burn scarf from a joint hazard reduction burn activity undertaken between QFES and Queensland Parks and Wildlife a couple of months ago in the Broadwater State Forest. And that hazard reduction burn was instrumental in helping to shape that fire and to reduce the areas that were impacted by that fire. If that hadn't have been there, we would have had a very active wall or fire front moving towards those houses. I have no doubt that the loss of property and potentially the loss of life would have been a far worse scenario than the one that we've currently experienced. Hello everyone, good afternoon. I think the whole issue of hazard reduction targets is a difficult conversation to have. It would be easy to burn large swathes of Queensland to hit a target, but you've got to have the burns in the right area. If we do lots and lots of prescribed burning, then we're going to generate lots and lots of smoke. So that will potentially have impacts on things like respiratory illness, impacts on other industries, so vineyards, horticulture, tourism, all of those sort of things will be traded off as well. We'd rather be focused on the most difficult to deliver burns, which are often close up against communities. And it may be that some areas we don't treat and other areas we treat very frequently. Without having those targets, then you really don't have anything to drive your program towards. The question you ask is around the clearing of land in relation to protection of property. There's a lot of things you can do, but when you get to a point of where you're not sure, go and seek clarification. When you were talking to the land holder, he wanted to put a fire break up through here and one along here. So category A vegetation and category B vegetation is the blue. The Queensland government, under the vegetation management act, we regulate this blue and we regulate this red. And there's no restriction on him putting a fire management line through here. The person who's on the land, who's managing the land needs to take responsibility for managing the bushfire risk on the land as well. Land holders can build fire management lines. So like the one we see behind us, fire management line is a constructed line up to 10 meters wide that you can put on your property. We encourage you to talk to the local firewood and about the best placement of those. It's good to have a straight, well-maintained line where you know you can get to water, you know you can get away from fires, you know you can access fires. Nine times out of 10, near the fire management lines, they're lower amounts of fuel loads. So that means there's lower flame hight. For crews, that's a safe area to attack the fire with their hose lines and also other appliances. Around infrastructure, such as their house, significant water infrastructure like their tanks, you can clear up to 20 meters wide or one and a half times the height of the trees. So you can see the trees here are over 20 meters tall, which means that you could construct a break around that infrastructure of at least 30 meters. We have rural fire brigades throughout Queensland that are there to support you as the property owner to conduct hazard reduction burns. But basically if it's beyond two by two meters, so beyond one meter in any direction, two meter in diameter, you're gonna need a permit. Doesn't cost you anything. And the way you do it is you apply to your local fire warden as a fire warden finder. So we've got a couple of thousand fire wardens across the state. If they're doing their control burn and some of the vegetation dies as a result of that, that is exempted from acquiring any permit because they have that fire hazard reduction burn permit from the local fire warden. So that can be a legitimate use of it to keep it open for grazing and country healthy. When that can go wrong is when it's done too dry or too hot and ends up damaging trees and becoming out of control and that actually changes the forest structure. If you talk to your local fire warden and ask, then may well be possible to get the local brigade to come out and give you a hand. We do something, I believe it's over 2,500 of those a year or I say we, it's actually our fantastic rural fire brigade volunteers who deliver a lot of these. We can't guarantee we'll always do yours but if you come and ask, you may well get a lot of help and certainly you'll be able to get some advice. Well, basically in most of the catastrophic conditions you're actually trying to control the fire is almost hopeless. You can't get anywhere near the head of the fire because it's too intense. When I was younger working in forestry I remember a fire jumping the Palmerstone Passage. Even several hundred metres during a catastrophic fire I will not stop a catastrophic fire from jumping. And so all of the heavy fuels, so trees, fire would just race up those trees, get all of that back and send it over to the other side and all the heavy fuels, so any logs and stuff that were on the ground would just catch a light and stay a light for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and you put water on them and they just wouldn't go out. You know, catastrophic days are basically the fire does its own thing. We can't manage it, it's just about keeping people out of the way. So it's all about public safety, keeping people alive and moving people out of the way of fires and waiting for the weather conditions to become favourable so you can start to manage them. There is a limit to our ability to suppress fires and we're seeing this at the moment where fires are too intense or too fast moving for us to be able to deal with them and that's first and foremost from a firefighter's safety point of view but secondly just purely from the scale and size of these fires. The rate of extreme fire weather is also on the increase in Australia so that trend is already there and given our temperatures are only going to increase into the future then there will be a trend in I guess more extreme fire weather conditions. We're getting more intensity in the fire weather which means that in any given place the conditions will be worse than they used to be. Maybe not every day but some days for sure and those big fire event days have a big impact. So I think we need to be really careful that this is not the new norm. The fires that we're seeing at the moment are I guess a taste of what's to come so conditions of forecast have become worse than this so longer fire seasons, more severe fire seasons so therefore one could expect for fires to become worse than what we're currently experiencing. The fire will probably become a bigger thing in Queensland in the coming years given we're going into a hotter and drier climate. All of this is about risk management. There is no guarantee from any one measure. As a community and as a society we need to have an understanding and an acceptance of the fact that we live in a bushfire prone environment and we'll continue to do so and there will always be fires in the landscape. What you can do is have a lot of attention to what's around the immediate environments of your house. So if you were to protect your house by having it really tidy having all the gutters clean and all that sort of thing that's pretty important to understand. The really important concept here is that there's a shared responsibility so it's not just the responsibility of governments to manage this but it's across everyone in Queensland. So from private landowners through to land management organisations through to governments. So we all have a role to play and there are multiple tools that are going to contribute to us managing risk. This is the complexity of managing fire in our environment and managing fuel loads and fire risk. It's about prioritising how we reduce the risk in those areas and then putting in place a suite of measures to deal with that which includes putting in fire breaks. It's about using mechanical means to reduce fuel such as slashing and it's about using fire where we can. So use of fire in Australia is a very complex issue and unfortunately there is no simple answer to it. I wish there was.