Ms BADGER – Thank you. Earlier this year in the preseason fire briefing – which I thank you and the minister’s office for, it was very thorough and in particular thank you for providing the report, although it’s publicly available online, and the lessons that were learnt from the LA fires. In that briefing there was made mention of the need to sort of look at how in Tasmania, particularly I suppose in Hobart and the Derwent Valley areas that are globally renowned for their fire risk, how to stop house‑to‑house ignition, particularly as we transition to places that are going to have more lithium batteries and batteries for charging electric vehicles. What are the next steps for the TFS in looking at how we can do that locally here as well as from the lessons of the LA Fire? What are the next steps that the TFS are going to be reviewing and reporting on to then practically implement that throughout the community?
Mr SMITH – Through you, minister, if I may. There’s a couple of aspects to that. Obviously, Wellington Park – and Wellington Park Trust are currently reviewing the emergency management and fire management plan for Wellington Park, which includes the fuel management, managing the loads, managing the access of people, et cetera, but also the areas of the interface between the park and suburbia, as such. Part of that planning is also understanding what we can treat around the Wellington Park and inside the ground itself. A lot of the fuels are not treatable by burning, so we have to look at other opportunities to mitigate the risk in the Wellington Park Trust and the surrounds.
The issues around the fire in Greece aggressing into suburbia, as such, it was part of a tour that I put Matt Lowe on to go and view and learn from what occurred in LA. I’m not sure Matt, if you’d like to add anything to understanding those risks in the next steps.
Mr Matt LOWE – Thanks commissioner and through you, minister. One of the themes I looked at when I went to LA was that urban conflagration, which is a term the Americans have coined to replace firestorm. So, it’s basically when a bushfire extends into an urban environment and you have that house‑to‑house ignition. There are several ways they’re mitigating that in America through early detection, rapid rate of attack, which we also engage with here.
I had a recent meeting with David Bowman from UTAS and he’s doing some work with RACT around mitigating these types of incidents and what we can do with reduction of fuel loads, not necessarily through fuel reduction burning, but other ways. We’ve had some early discussions around grant programs around home hardening, which the Americans have done a really good job on, of home‑hardening properties. Not necessarily every property in every street, but maybe a few select properties that would protect other properties and stop that. There is further work to be done and I will be catching up with David Bowman and his team for further discussions in that space.
