This is a very sad day for the Volunteer Firefighters Association of NSW with the passing of our Founder and inaugural President of ten consecutive years.
Mr. Peter Joseph Cannon OAM passed away overnight at Peak Hill Hospital having been born there on June 15th 1950.
Capital Community Radio has produced a three-part radio play commemorating the bravery and stoicism of all those involved in the fires at Dwellingup in 1961. These podcasts were created from the actual experiences and memories of survivors. Each part runs for about 15 to 20 minutes.
Well worth a listen.
Happy Easter everyone!
The fire season officially comes to a close with a number of brigades on the east coast doing flood cleanup work. Armidale gets a new tanker. Lots more news from around the state …
The ability of the RFS to do fire prediction modelling is about to gain a huge boost with the development of Spark 2. In this story the ABC tells us all about it …
Lucy Tiley, a student researcher at RMIT is looking for volunteer firefighters who were active in the Black Summer fires to help her with some research. Let’s give her a hand!
Bushfire recovery grant money has been used to support Mountains residents whose properties burnt, provide counselling, legal and health advice and help revive tourism and battered small businesses.
This is one of a number of stories in the News Roundup from across the state.
The team at the Charles Darwin University’s Darwin Centre for Bushfire Research has been working with Indigenous land managers, conservation, research and government organisations in northern Australia for the last 25 years to find more effective ways to manage wildfires.
These collaborations have led to a new approach, blending modern scientific knowledge with traditional Indigenous land management practices to reduce bushfire risk.
How? By reducing fuel load through a patchy mosaic of small, low intensity, burns early in the fire season that cut the risk of late dry season fires when greenhouse gas emissions are much greater.
Its been a quiet bushfire season so far, but Shane Fitzsimmons was still making the news – for all the wrong reasons. This is one of a number of stories from across the state in our News Roundup.
Of all the factors that contribute to the intensity of a fire (temperature, wind speed, humidity, topography, fuel moisture and fuel load), only fuel load can be readily modified by human effort, but bearing in mind that since the industrial revolution it is now clear that humans have also modified the world’s temperature, and action on emissions may eventually assist to bring this down.
Citation: Emergency Leaders for Climate Action
As bushfires peaked in the Australian summer of 2019-20, we heard a lot of the myth of climate change as the prime cause of the flames’ spread and severity. In this article, Christine Finlay addresses climate change and a second myth, mostly promoted by politicians and leaders of bushfire management organisations: that an appropriate response is to promise a thorough review of bushfire management (via royal commissions or otherwise) while pre-emptively pouring yet more taxpayer dollars into fire-fighting organisations and aerial firefighting, in particular. This is the latest instance of a repeated pattern, more likely to worsen rather than improve the situation.