Life in bushfire danger zone gets ‘scarier every year’

  Life in bushfire danger zone gets ‘scarier every year’

19 August 2009

published by www.theaustralian.news.com.au


Australia — Ingrid Van Der Molen has lived in a mudbrick cottage surrounded by trees near the picturesque Victorian town of Woodend for the past 21 years. But perhaps not for much longer.

After the devastating fires of February, and after Woodend and surrounding areas were yesterday included on a list of 52 areas requiring enhanced township protection plans, the exhaustion showed on her face as she said, “I don’t want to live here any more”.

“Every year it seems to get a little scarier,” Ms Van Der Molen said. “And last year was particularly scary for me.”

She resolved long ago the question of whether to stay or go in the event of fire. “I’d leave,” she said. “You couldn’t defend this, no way.”

Ms Van Der Molen and her partner Bruce Clarke said they had been confronted by “farcical” regulations concerning fuel reduction. Trees overhang their roof, but when they inquired to the local council about cutting them back they were told the trees were growing in a 12m-wide easement controlled by the Department of Sustainability and Environment and it was not the council’s responsibility.

Yet in the 20 years that Ms Van Der Molen has owned her home, the DSE “hasn’t set foot on this property”.

“I just think its farcical,” she said. “It’s bureaucracy gone crazy.”

Mr Clarke’s parents lived in nearby Macedon at the time of the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, which destroyed 420 homes in Macedon and Mount Macedon.

He thinks conditions were worse on Black Saturday in February, when they packed their cars with valuables in case they were forced to flee. Predictions that this summer could be hotter and drier fill him with dread.

Surrounded by townships again rated as being at high risk, including Woodend, Blackwood, Macedon and Mount Macedon, he said: “It’s a toss-up, isn’t it, between where you like to live and what you have to put up with. On a hot, strong windy day, if you smell smoke, you sort of shiver.”

John Keating has been a CFA volunteer in Woodend for the past 39 years. He was a CFA first lieutenant during Ash Wednesday and then part of the Macedon and Mount Macedon Re-Establishment Committee, as those townships rebuilt. Since 1983, he said, population growth as Woodend expanded had meant that more trees had been planted and he was concerned that not enough had been done about fuel reduction.

He believes trees on Black Forest Drive, the main road into the town, should be severely lopped, or removed.
 


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