Clear a fire break, get abused in parliament - with photos

If you want to see the source of the fuss and bother in my next post, go to Google Maps and type in "Bimberi Nature Reserve". If you zoom in a bit, you will see some faint lines that cross the national parks from east to west - if you keep zooming in on them, you'll eventually see the fire trails and high voltage power lines in detail.



These cleared trails are described as 60 metres wide, which is about right when using the scale in the bottom right hand corner of the Google page. But note that the pylons themselves appear to be about 20 metres wide (if you go to Google and look for yourself and zoom in as much as possible, the ghostly grey/blue towers will appear).

Clearly, the sensible thing is not to clear a trail only as wide as the pylon - if the pylon is 20 metres wide, you don't clear a 20 metre wide track and allow tall trees to rub up against the wires and pylons - you clear enough space on both sides so that a fire won't take out the wires or pylons. Sixty metres sounds about right to me.

The thing that struck me when looking at these parks from a long way up is that yes, the trails are visible - but very faintly - but they are tiny scratchings across a vasts series of parks. The amount of national park in that area is immense - someone told me once it was larger than Switzerland.

So it's not like we're that short of trees that we have to stress over a few fire trails.