Comment: The people in my community at the moment are not interested in a climate debate; they are interested in getting water to the areas that need it, rebuilding and making sure their children have beds to sleep in over Christmas, writes Melinda Pavey
The stress on our forests is extreme. But it has been felt before. In 1980, the Waterfall fires between Sydney and Wollongong burnt 2.5 million acres. In 2016, it was near Goulburn where they lost almost 1000 livestock. In 1974, more than 15 million acres were burnt around the western parts of the state – more than triple the area burnt over the past month in NSW. These fires have been traumatic, but we have seen events like this before.
We are building dams in NSW for the first time in more than a decade – doubling the capacity of Wyangala Dam, a river system that is under enormous stress. In Tamworth, we are also building a new dam at Dungowan, which will take the stress off our major industries such as poultry. On the Mole River, at the Queensland border, we are exploring the option to build a new dam.
Some of the landscape hasn’t had fire of this intensity in living memory, and some properties right beside National Parks have not taken action to mitigate themselves against these fires. We do have to learn from every experience, as we have learnt from previous fires. As a result, we have done work to improve planning codes, reducing the number of people living in our forests, as well as improved back burning and clearing our forests.
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