Recent scans reveal almost 300 hot spots which require attention over a fire edge that adds up to almost 60km. These are predominately on the Border, Big Jack Mt and Postman’s Trail fires, with only a couple of minor spots on the Badja fire.
Latest Far South Coast bushfire update from the Rural Fire Service 20th February 2020
In many ways the old adage of “no news is good news” basically holds true at the moment, but it’s probably important that people understand why there still seems to be a fair bit of fire fighting activity both in the air and on the ground.
Our strategy is now basically built around locating hot spots and ensuring they can’t cause us any further problems. Forward Looking Infra-Red cameras mounted to aircraft are used to detect heat sources that can range from pockets of ash to hollow trees that are still burning. Our most recent scans have revealed almost 300 hot spots that require attention over a fire edge that adds up to almost 60km. These are predominately on the Border, Big Jack Mt and Postman’s Trail fires, with only a couple of minor spots on the Badja fire.
The images below give an overview of how spread out the hotspots are, and show that they are not always accessible to vehicle based fire fighters. In many instances we will need to insert crews from the air to enable them to break open logs so that water bucketing operations can make sure “the wet stuff gets on the hot stuff”.
The FLIR images show the type of information we get back and what we are actually dealing with on the ground. It’s worth noting that the black and white image provides a guide to the amount of heat that was present when the image was taken.
We are feeling increasingly confident that this strategy is going to be successful, but it’s not going to be quick and it’s not going to be easy. We know everyone would love to see these fires put out once and for all, but this really is the best option we have now.
Hang in there, we are winning and we won’t walk away from this until we’re sure it can’t hurt us again.