Tuesday, July 21, 2009 • Lassen County Fire Safe Council manager featured at international conference

Publisher’s note: This story originally appeared in the Tuesday, July 21, 2009 edition of the Lassen County Times.

Tom Esgate, managing director of the Lassen County Fire Safe Council, Inc., led a presentation at the International Wildfire Management Conference held in Sydney, Australia June 18-20.

Fire service and resource specialists from around the world gathered to present and share information on research and technology, challenges they all face and how to make communities safer.

Esgate was invited to give a presentation entitled “Collaborative Approach to Wildfire Mitigation,” which featured Lassen County’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan process and Lassen County Fire Safe Council’s Susanville, River Bench, Day Lassen Bench and Butte Creek projects. His focus was on how federal, state and local agencies and Native American tribes work together to implement projects and restore habitats and watersheds on a landscape scale.

“Our presentation was well received and individuals were constantly asking me questions and complementing our efforts over the entire three days of the conference,” Esgate said.

Esgate began his 10-day trip to Australia by attending the 2009 Fires Royal Commission hearings in Melbourne where the group discussed the events surrounding the 187 lives that were lost in the state of Victoria when numerous fires erupted on a record 117-degree day and were pushed by 60 mile-per-hour winds.

“The fires occurred during a heightened state of alert,” Esgate said. “For a lot of people, the only safe evacuation would have been to leave before the fires ever ignited. Once the fires flared up, evacuation was not an option for many due to the intensity of the fires and the speed at which they traveled. Many of those killed were in the process of evacuating.”

Australia has a 99-percent volunteer fire service and has conducted extensive efforts to get information to its citizens as to how to survive through a fire event.

“After sitting through some of the testimony, I left convinced that the death toll would have been much, much higher if the residents had not been well informed as to how to shelter in place,” Esgate said. “Getting back to the conference, much of the discussion dealt with the predicted greater intensity of fires we should expect with the climate change that is occurring.

According to Keith Harrap, assistant commissioner for New South Wales Fire Service, ‘What happened in Victoria could have happened in New South Wales, San Diego or any number of places, it just happened there first; We all expect more extreme events to occur with climate change.’”

After the conference closed, Esgate spent the day touring the Blue Mountain communities outside of Sydney with Tony Jarrett of the NSW Fire Service. He learned how the volunteer brigades function and the challenges they face with the heavy fuel loads that surround the communities. Jarrett was also a member of an investigative team that met with residents who survived the Victoria fires.

“During the conference and over the day we spent in the field, Tony shared a lot of what he has learned, both within his community and as a result of his participation in the post Victoria fire investigation,” Esgate said.

Esgate plans to share what he has learned in Australia with the Lassen County community when the Fire Safe Council holds is next monthly meeting at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, July 6 at the Susan River Fire Protection District office on Richmond Road. The public is invited to attend.