Fire sparks controversy
FOR THE inhabitants of New South Wales, Australia, the nightmare is finally over. "The bushfire, undoubtedly the fiercest one ever witnessed in the modern history of the continent, has been contained at last," declared an exhausted but visibly relieved Bush Fire Services Commissioner, Phil Koperburg, in Sydney in mid-January. His troop of 20,000 fire-fighters consisted of volunteers as well as trained army and navy personnel.
The fire-fighters battled round the clock right through the first fortnight of January. The fires were fed by the forest wood, which had turned into dry timber in the heat of the summer. Flames soon engulfed Australia's eastern seaboard and raged across the Blue Mountains, the Wollemi, Kuring-gai and the Royal National Parks. Then Sydney, Australia's most populous city, was surrounded by great walls of fire. "The loss of property has indeed been enormous," said a government spokesperson. "Hundreds have lost their homes and more than 600,000 ha of land cover severely charred."
Farmers agitated
Though the fire has been put out, the heat is still on in New South Wales. Australian farmers are now seething with anger against the government and wonder why the authorities paid no heed to warnings issued by Koperburg almost year ago. Koperburg had reportedly expressed great concern over the government's fire-fighting strategy. He felt that "control burns" of undergrowth in the bushland were urgently required to check the ground fuel build-up, which had already reached a dangerous level.
The question that is being raised is whether the government delayed action because it was being pressurised by the powerful conservation lobby to leave national parks alone. This could well be the case, because some prominent environmentalists in Australia strongly oppose the policy of lighting low intensity fires at regular intervals to get rid of excess firewood. "This may be necessary around farms and houses, but why in the national parks, which fall in the wilderness zone anyway?" they ask.
However, those who have clamoured for a well-defined fire-fighting policy after the catastrophe, dismiss the conservationists' argument as "baseless". "Hundred and fifty years ago, the aborigines frequently set fire to drive out game animals," points out Russel Cumming, a botanist in Townsville. This practice, he claims, released combustible material and prevented the breaking out of intense fires, which may be fewer in number but have a far more devastating effect on the environment. "They upset the ecological balance, change the species composition and reduce biodiversity," says Cumming.
Conservationists, however, are adamantly holding their ground. "It just proves that the aborigines cared very little for Mother Nature. For, their fire-management traditions allowed fire resistant plants like eucalyptus to take over, producing the monotonous vegetation we see today," quipped one of them to the Sydney daily, The Australian.
While the farmers and the environmentalists fight it out, the government is making a desperate bid to salvage its ashen image. New South Wales minister for emergency services Terry Griffiths said he received Koperburg's report only 48 hours before it was tabled in parliament and did not have enough time to act on it before the onset of summer. He added that summer had not been the time to act.
Meanwhile, the government has launched a mammoth rehabilitation programme. It has set up a special committee to liaise with voluntary agencies, like the Lord Mayor's Bushfire Appeal, that have been raising funds to aid the victims of the disaster. The donations will be used to repair houses and community centres. The government has also set up toll-free hotlines to provide counselling to business operators and farmers affected by the fire.
Much to the relief of the minister, local information technology companies, too, have come forward to help. Computer companies like Autodesk, Lotus, Unisys and Toshiba have donated generous amounts to the fire-fighting agencies. More importantly, they have come up with a range of sophisticated computer-aided equipment that help the overworked fire-fighters considerably.
This may help mitigate the suffering of the people, but Griffiths is unlikely to be spared by his belligerent cabinet colleagues. A group of members of parliament belonging to the National Party are reportedly gearing up for a major clash on the issue of the creation of 350,000 ha of a "wilderness zone".
"We shall fight it tooth and nail," swore a member of the rebel group. "The zones would restrict public access and pose further fire hazards."
The beleaguered Griffiths is now striving to make his peace on all fronts. "Now that the battle against the bushfire has been won, we must sit down in the cool light of day and analyse what we could have done better and what lessons we have learnt," he observed. And the common citizen in New South Wales is fervently hoping not to have to face such a situation again.