If you were in eastern Australia, then Black Summer was a fire season that you will remember. Crazy fires, loss of life and houses, millions of animals killed, enormous damage to landscapes, including across the mountains.

One particular fire was at Mt Tabletop in the Alpine national park, which was started by a lightning strike on December 31, 2019. It went on to become an enormous blaze of more than 40,000 hectares that threatened the village of Dinner Plain twice, and many houses in the Cobungra area. It also had significant ecological impacts, burning large areas that had been burnt previously, compounding the damage caused by those earlier fires.

I was involved in fire fighting efforts at the time, and have wandered through the fire footprint many times (one report back is here).

With a couple of mild summers in recent years there has been a mad rush of vegetation growth (sadly often grass and shrubs rather than trees, although a couple of mild summers have helped with re-establishment of snow gum seedlings). So it’s harder to get in there now days. But with good snowpack this July I went for a ski into some of the area between Mt Tabletop and Dinner Plain to see how the recovery was going, and was very disturbed to see the loss of the entire forest in large areas that had previously been snow gum woodland.

One of my experiences of this blaze was that it started as a very small fire on a single tree hit by lightning. There were government firefighters in the area who were tasked with dealing with the many lightning strikes in the area. But there weren’t enough crews and they were pulled out to protect houses in Cobungra when it started to get away on them.

I often wonder what might have happened if us CFA volunteers were allowed to walk in to help with the small fires. We were refused permission as we didn’t have dry firefighting training. Surely its time for Victoria to set up a remote area firefighting team as TAS, the ACT and NSW have done.

You can find out more about this proposal here.

And you can express your interest in this sort of fire fighting here.

You can see two generations of forest killed by fire here: the over story of older trees, and the lower thick, flammable regrowth killed in the Black Summer fire.