Authorities are concerned that this year’s fire danger season has all the hall marks of the lead up to Ash Wednesday more than 40 years ago.


This summer’s “drier than normal” fire danger season has been exacerbated by a lack of rain over winter.


The season has been compared by locals and experts alike to 1983 due to the similarities including the hailstorms in Casterton late last year and the continued dry conditions.


SA CFS Region 5 Regional Operations Manager Danny Crozier said there was currently high soil dryness in the South East, determined by how many millimetres of rain was required before the water sits on the top of the ground.


“Coonawarra is sitting at 153 so it would need 153mm of rain to saturate the soil,” he said.


“It does not lessen the threat of fire. It helps with how we control the fire because you have got that moisture whereas now it’s just timber dry.


“Obviously we did not see the rainfall over the winter which has meant … our soil dryness is sitting probably where it should be in late February.


“Even leading up to December it was already four to six weeks in front of where it should have been which is a big indication to how the season is going to step up if we do not get that rain.

“We keep getting told there is a possibility of rain but we just have not seen it so the forest areas are very dry.


“It has taken a lot longer to crop certainly in farming areas so there is still harvesting going on in part of the Lower South East compared to the Upper South East around Keith where the crops only germinated 30cm because they did not get the rain fall which it varies for our risk in that grassland.


“The risk is still there because obviously it’s not worth them harvesting because there’s no money so the crops are still there so that fuel loading is still quite high in some areas.”


Mr Crozier said late rains at this time of year will only be helpful if they are ongoing.


“It will help but at the same time it will create new growth and if the rain does not continue then that growth will die off as well which will create a fuel load,” he said.


“Last year we saw some late rains in November and December so we saw Naracoorte flood and a few other events with those rain bombs which meant that our soil dryness was pretty much zero.


“Last year it (the soil dryness) was sitting around that 20-40mm mark because we had the late rains.


“They are still saying that January and February down here for us are going to be the danger areas so we are keeping a closer eye on that.


“We will monitor if a fire happens a bit closely because we are aware there is more of a risk.


“We do some risk mitigation back in the region and weigh everything up especially with volunteer numbers and how everything’s looking.


“We definitely having an ageing population within our volunteer force, what we are seeing is smaller townships that are reducing.”


Forward thinking measures were used by the CFS at the scrub and grass fire in Joanna, around 15km south of Naracoorte, which started on New Year’s Day and destroyed around 50 hectares of scrub.


The fire was “an unfortunate accident” caused by hot ashes tipped out of a fire the day before which had not cooled.


A Blackhawk and three Air Tractors from the Mount Gambier Airport were used to create 12-14 containment lines using 2500 litres of fire retardant per drop.


“They had to bring more retardant down from Adelaide because we did not have the stocks here,” Mr Crozier said.


“We had enough risk to enact certain things, we made it a total fire ban response which meant instead of two trucks initially going out to a fire, there were four straight away.


“Volunteers were out there for five days so we had obviously the risk of the weather coming in two days after the fire had started.

“Predictions had stated that it would take out some of the pine trees that surrounded which would be a huge loss to the area and then move across the border.


“We were getting things organised just in case the worst-case scenario happened so there was a lot of work that happened there.


“It stayed within the containment lines we put so we even brought down aircraft retardant lines which have not really been used down here before.


“Normally down in the South East, you put dozer line around it and you do some backburning but with the fuel load and how dry it was, the best option we had was retardant lines.”