Sophia wrote on Jan 10
th, 2026 at 10:24pm:
The current fires in Victoria are worse than I reslised. Hundreds of houses burnt.
A lot of livestock killed
My kids live in Mornington peninsula and said they smelt smoke all day and the sun was red.
We didn’t get the smoke and haze until later this afternoon.
I’ve heard reports smoke can been seen from New Zealand!
Those firefighters are working hard.
And one reporter interviewing a man that decided to stay and defend his house, he actually saved his house (from flying embers) while his neighbours houses burnt.
This is exactly what we would do… I have the equipment and breathing mask with charcoal filter etc
Of course we have plan B as an escape.
In the meantime… I’m packing photo albums, photos, usb sticks and other keepsakes to put in a safe place.
We’ve got the grass in paddocks down to an inch of its life!
Gutters all cleared.
Anything wood or dead leaves or fuel for fire cleared.
And 20 litre buckets filled with water all around house perimeter.
We keep gates to dam access open for our local FB if they need water quick to refill their tanks.
Before every summer I worry.
As much as I love the countryside and trees, and wildlife, I worry and dread to stay but don’t want to leave!
I watched a few vids people took and one thing stood out…. All the vacant areas with long grass…that grass burnt and spread fire from one town to another.
So much for a green wedge.
What’s the use of it?
There is a litany of depressing background to all this. For example, rural firefighting in Victoria has been deeply politicised. It is now run from Melbourne, with policy in the hands of people with little practical bushfire experience and zero accountability. The once-proud and independent Country Fire Authority has been subsumed by the urban fire brigade system and CFA volunteers are treated as second-class citizens. The highly professional Forest Commission, at one time the leaders in bushfire management in Australia, no longer exists, replaced by something called Forest Fire Management Victoria which has never achieved a molecule of respect from the Victorian bushfire community.
When it comes to nearly every aspect of bushfire management in Victoria, it is urban unionists and university academics, not experienced bushfire specialists or rural Victorians who are calling the shots.
Just as bad, the government has all but abandoned Victoria’s once-excellent fuel reduction prescribed burning program. Instead, they have adopted an approach (originally called “Residual Risk”, then renamed “Safer Together”) based on computer models. The new approach is incomprehensible even to most bushfire experts, let alone the public. It leaves forests, bushland and farms to Mother Nature, while attention is focused on attempting to reduce the risk around towns.
The result of this policy is that bushfires starting deep in the mountains or in remoter forests are nearly always burning in heavy, long-unburnt fuels, making the fires more intense, more damaging, harder to control and more likely to be generating an ember storm by the time they reach residential areas. The tiny amount of burning that is done is insufficient to be effective.
Opponents of prescribed burning have convinced the government that it is endangering the biodiversity – but they seem not to give a fig for the disastrous impact of high-intensity wildfires on biodiversity, which is the inevitable outcome of failing to mitigate wildfires in the bush.
A feature of the Residual Risk or Safer Together approach, by the way, is that the greater the area burnt by wildfires, the more the strategy is deemed to be successful, ie, the more the risk is calculated to be reduced. That this sort of thing is seriously promoted by highly paid senior government officers is mystifying.
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/doomed-planet/another-predictable-disaster...
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