Our popular fire preparedness workshops are getting rave reviews from landholders and interest is growing faster than ever ahead of talk of a dry season ahead.

We sat down with Hannah Etchells who has been on the front-line of engaging landholders, communities, and a myriad of stakeholders as she delivers fire management planning workshops across the region. We’ve asked her to give us the lowdown on why the workshops are proving so popular.

Meet Hannah Etchells, fire ecologist and one of our budding Senior Scientists at Healthy Land & Water. She’s been on the road for the last six months for the Queensland Fire & Biodiversity Consortium (QFBC) delivering fire information nights and fire preparedness workshops.

We will introduce you to Hannah, and then ask her to give us the inside scoop about two of her recent preparedness and resilience workshops.

Meet Hannah Etchells

With a passion for ecology, fire science, and science communication, Hannah's expertise extends across domestic and international wildfire research, prescribed burning, and community outreach. 

From politicians to school kids to farmers and fellow scientists, Hannah works tirelessly to bridge the knowledge gap, stressing the vital link between understanding our environment and safeguarding our collective wellbeing.

As one of the driving forces behind our QFBC’s state training program, she plays a crucial role in planning and delivering fire management workshops for stakeholders and rural landholders.

In this article, through Hannah’s experience, we delve into a couple of the property fire management planning workshops the QFBC delivered in the Gladstone and Livingstone Regional Council areas. Both workshops are a part of QFBC’s Black Summer Bushfire Recovery Program, which is funded by the Australian Government’s Black Summer Bushfire Recovery Grants Program.

Q: Hannah, can you introduce us to the work that you’re doing?

After the devastating Black Summer bushfires a few years back, the Australian Government released grant funding to help bushfire-impacted and high-risk communities in recovery, resilience, and future preparedness.

Here at Healthy Land & Water’s QFBC, we are privileged to be able to use this funding to run a series of community outreach programs, workshops, and on-ground works.

In recent months we’ve been working in close collaboration with both Gladstone and Livingstone Regional Councils, and working intensively across both regions. We have been happy to roll out our property fire management planning workshop series for local landholders in these regions.

Q: Can you tell us more about those two community workshops? What is making them so popular with landholders in particular?

Of course! One of them was held at the Mount Maurice Fire Brigade for landholders in the high-risk Greater Gladstone area. The second was held in an area affected by one of the Black Summer bushfires, the 2019 Cobraball fire scar. That one was held at the Maryvale Fire Brigade.

Both workshops were big collaborative community days, where a diverse group of people including local councils, fire brigade members, government agencies, and rural landholders came together to discuss and brainstorm all things bushfire.

We find that when landholders see the large, A0-sized maps of their properties that we provide them with, they can’t wait to start mapping their infrastructure, tracks, water points, land use zones, vegetation types, and fire history.

We guide them through this process so that these maps become individual landholder property fire management plans that will both help them with future planning as well as be useful in an emergency.

As we are walking around the room helping everyone, we make sure we use all the same symbology as emergency services so the maps can be quickly and easily interpreted.

Another thing the landholders love is when they see how their individual maps fit into the greater landscape – this is great for context and understanding their bushfire risk. Seeing it in this way makes the next part of the workshop really interactive, as our team facilitates a discussion about an overarching community fire management plan, and what on-ground works would be most beneficial to the unique landscapes and needs of the community.

From here, we are able to identify the highest risk areas in each community, and where there is a need for new or upgraded fire trails, water tanks, firefighting equipment, and fuel management.

This is essential information to start the planning phase, including mapping out new and improved evacuation routes, as well as discussing alternative fire mitigation strategies, such as the use of ‘green breaks’.

We had a videographer come along to one of our workshops, so for those of you who would like to get a glimpse into one of our fire workshops in action, we’ve uploaded a short video so you can see first hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RIDv9nWPNs.

Q: Do you know how many hectares are now covered by a fire plan because of these workshops?

Across these two workshops alone, we welcomed 35 landholders across 27 properties, covering approximately 850 ha of privately owned bushland.

In these two workshops alone, that’s around 1,600 AFL fields of bush that now has a detailed fire management plan and a whole lot of engaged landholders who now have the knowledge and resources to help keep themselves safe, as well as keep their bushland healthy.

Since I joined QFBC earlier this year, I’ve been lucky enough to deliver nearly 30 workshops. It would take me a while to look at the hectares for each workshop – but it is a lot of football fields!

What’s next?

Glad you asked! Now we are getting to work really closely with a range of other stakeholders and partners to finalise planning and start delivering on ground works. This includes the two local Indigenous groups, Darumbal Enterprises and the Port Curtis Coral Coast Trust representative of First Nations Bailai, Gurang, Gooreng Gooreng, and Taribelang Bunda Peoples Aboriginal Corporation in the area, to facilitate and help implement the culturally and ecologically sensitive on-ground works components of this project. This also includes capacity building, training, and collaboration opportunities for the First Nations groups. Stay tuned!

Find out more about all the different QFBC workshops and the Black Summer Bushfire Recovery Program.