[On screen: Jason Hellyer, Deputy Chief Fire Officer, FFMVic Grampians]
Speaker: Jason Hellyer
I'll take you back to winter 2021. Significant storm events impacted the whole state of Victoria.
This impacted homes, roads, public utilities. It was particularly impactful in the Wombat State Forest in terms of the forested area.
A really awesome effort from all emergency organizations and utilities companies to get people back at home, get roads open and really get power back on.
It's not uncommon to see sites like the one we're at today where there is huge numbers of trees, thousands of trees down on the ground, entangle and really, the forest significantly disrupted.
One of the really key things for us at Forest Fire Management Victoria is to keep fires small.
We do rapid and decisive first attack to fires, we put a small machine in to get to the fire, create a mineral earth trail around the fire to take away the fuel.
If these forests remain how they are at the moment, getting through them is very challenging for machines.
The necessity of having staff virtually walking in front of machines with chainsaws to cut our way into these spots, is an unacceptable risk to our people.
Community safety is incredibly important for us, but firefighter safety is equally important.
I've tasked our team to undertake comprehensive risk assessment process around these sites. We only want to treat ones we think are absolutely necessary to treat.
They apply a criteria of: what is the condition of the forest? How much fuel is there? How much disruption to the forest is there?
But they overlay; where is this piece of forest in relation to community? Where is this piece of forest in relation to homes and public and private assets?
How important is this road or this piece of forest in terms of access and egress for people in a broader fire, and how much is that kind of road used?
All of those things contribute to us choosing and prioritizing sites will only treat stuff that absolutely needs to be traded.
I'm asked often around the environment and what do we do to protect the environment.
So we have significant desktop assessments that are undertaken on the sites that we plan to treat.
Those assessments, identify all known threatened species, all known biodiversity values on that site. We support that with third party surveying.
Our staff gather all of this information and our field staff and our superintendents on the ground go out and they prepare sites.
They physically mark out those high biodiversity value areas and areas that we can’t have machinery into.
In recent times, we've taken, I think, around 3000 tonnes of wood to local collection areas for domestic firewood.
We've really prioritized the use of this, wood from the forest for uses that really benefit community.
The government is developing a framework that will provide clarity on management of timber by-products from its forest and fire management activities.
Until that happens, we will continue to prioritize community and community opportunity.
Page last updated: 09/10/25