The fire that should never have happened
This is not just a story of a fire that got out of control — it’s a story of a system that was never in control to begin with.
On 9 August 2018, a landholder on Yankees Gap Road near Bemboka, on the south coast of New South Wales, did what many had done before him. He organised a controlled burn to reduce fuel loads in a small section of his property, approximately five hectares adjoining the national park. Both tenures carried fuel that had built up since the mid-1980s. The intention behind the burn was not misplaced; landowners have long used fire to reduce fuel loads and promote pasture growth. However, in this case, the execution was nothing short of shambolic.
The Rural Fire Service (RFS) officers visited the site, but confusion about responsibility arose early. Two RFS volunteers were involved, yet neither took decisive ownership of the planning, execution, or oversight. The coronial inquiry revealed a muddled understanding between them regarding authority, who conducted the site inspection, and what recommendations had been made.
What was meant to be a straightforward burn became the very disaster it aimed to prevent. The fire was lit immediately before weather conditions should have disqualified it from proceeding. A steep, fuel-laden forested slope lay directly above the ignition point, making fire behaviour always unpredictable.
Planning documentation was unclear. There was no evidence of a comprehensive burn plan, no clarity regarding contingency arrangements, and no established lines of communication. Given the local brigade’s involvement and the site’s complexities, no RFS trucks or volunteers were present, except during sporadic visits primarily in response to emergency calls. The district officer was off sick, and no replacement was appointed. In his absence, the entire oversight chain operated on assumptions where the landholder assumed RFS was in charge, and the RFS assumed it was a private burn.
Within a week, the fire was out of control and spreading into the nearby South East Forest National Park. It burned for nearly three months, scorching 20,000 hectares of the park and the neighbouring Wadbilliga National Park. Four homes were lost, hundreds of kilometres of fencing were destroyed, and an untold number of livestock were killed. The estimated damage bill reached $9.3 million.
Jan Reynolds, a resident for 26 years and the first to lose her house and belongings, told reporters:
This was not an act of nature; it was an act of man, and the catastrophe it became should have been circumvented.
This wasn’t just a miscalculation; it was negligence dressed up as business as usual. Despite multiple red flags, the landowner was led to believe it was safe to proceed. The result was all but inevitable.
What follows is a forensic examination of how a poorly conceived and incompetently managed burn evolved into a destructive wildfire, and how that failure reflects an emergency bureaucracy that no longer understands fire, land, or basic risk reduction.
Who was in charge? Nobody knows
The first red flag was confusion over who was responsible for carrying out the burn. Lighting fires these days isn’t as straightforward as it once was. This reflects a lack of fire management experience among many newer landholders and a reliance on volunteer brigades, which are themselves often under-supported.
The fire was doomed despite the landholder’s best intentions. Fuels should have been managed earlier in the year when the fuel moisture differentials and overnight humidity provided safer conditions. This may have required more active effort, but it would have been safer.
The landholder believed that the RFS was managing the burn, while the RFS considered it a private matter and distanced itself from responsibility. Neither party had the full picture.
And where was the National Parks and Wildlife Service in all this? Given the fire’s proximity to the park boundary and the known fuel loads, they arguably should have been involved in the planning process. Perhaps they were not aware.
Coronial Inquiry
Held five years later, the inquiry offered little comfort to those who lost homes and livelihoods.
It delivered far more than just another tale of a burn gone wrong. It serves as a damning case study of how modern fire management, bloated with bureaucratic processes, centralised authority, and a creeping detachment from the land, has lost its way.
The fire was not merely an isolated incident. It was the tragic and predictable outcome of a culture that values control-room command over hands-on competence; a culture that is far more comfortable responding to fires than preventing them.
The property owner sought approval for the burn from RFS through the local brigade volunteers. This is typically achieved through the Bush Fire Hazard Reduction Certificate process, a requirement outside the Bushfire Danger Period, which, according to the coroner:
Provided a defence to offences under the Rural Fires Act, as well as other environmental legislation, if the landowner is burning vegetation for hazard reduction purposes or land clearance on private property.
After receiving verbal approval, the landholder hired a contractor to create a firebreak around the perimeter.
The landholder admitted to the coroner that he had only learned about these certificates four days before providing oral evidence. He also acknowledged that he had not prepared a written burn plan, despite the requirement for one when applying for a Hazard Reduction Certificate.
Worse still, the local brigade captain who facilitated the application had received no training in legislative requirements or hazard reduction protocols, including the requirements for the Hazard Reduction Certificate. Additionally, he was unaware of the RFS information pamphlets that exist to inform the public about the process.
As any forester has opined for the last 20 years or so, the bureaucratic emergency response monolith has expanded to replace professional land management, reflecting the underlying causes of why disastrous fires, such as those at Yankees Gap, continue to occur.
A fire lit in a vacuum of leadership and poor risk assessment
The systemic flaws identified in the coronial inquiry didn’t just appear in hindsight; they were present on the ground that day, in real time, as the fire was being lit and mismanaged.
The district officer, a key figure, was off sick, and no one replaced him. Believing the RFS would provide support, the landholder, ill-equipped, ignited the fire without conducting a pre-burn checklist or fire weather briefing. Brigade volunteers responded on two separate days.
By the morning of 15 August, the fire, which was presumed extinguished, was rechecked. Conflicting accounts emerged; one suggested the RFS arrived at 5:30 am to mop up hotspots, while another stated that a call to 000 at 11:40 am alerted authorities to a reignition.
Regardless, no serious reassessment was conducted, and the RFS decided to leave, despite the weather forecast for that day predicting winds of 30-45 kilometres per hour and a high fire danger rating. Both the RFS and the landholder testified that the fire was benign, there was no smoke, and nothing was alight.
At the inquiry, one of the brigade captains was asked whether he was comfortable leaving an active fire near high fuel loads below a slope next to a large contiguous forested area in a national park. His response:
That’s the position that was taken because it was his [the landholder’s] fire, and we did what we were required to go up and do.
Despite the fire’s location at the base of steep slopes and among volatile fuel loads, the RFS’s risk assessment processes were nearly non-existent. The only documents in circulation were generic hazard reduction certificates. No detailed pre-burn risk matrix was completed. There was no scenario planning for escape, and no backup resources were available. Insufficient equipment and personnel were on site.
Worse still, there was no requirement for real-time, on-site risk reassessment before ignition, even though burn conditions can change within hours.
Emergency bureaucracy, not land management
The real story here isn’t just that a small burn with high risk was poorly planned and executed, and eventually escaped. It’s that no one knew who was supposed to be doing what, and that’s a direct result of the way the RFS now operates under a centralised emergency management framework.
Once a volunteer bushfire fighting service built on local knowledge and practical fire experience, the RFS has transformed into a bureaucratic behemoth, primarily equipped to respond to fires while being more focused on red trucks, aircraft sorties, and media briefings during fire events than on preventing them.
Its senior officers are desk-bound emergency managers, often parachuted in from unrelated backgrounds, who are more comfortable with dashboards and data feeds than with weather forecasts and soil moisture. They pass the time preening around the office in their immaculate military-style uniforms, competing with each other to see whose epaulettes adorn every available space on their collars and sleeves.
Meanwhile, the organisation considers prescribed burning a side hobby rather than the core business of fire mitigation.
Worse, the coronial inquiry revealed that no formal protocols existed for “assisted private burns”, a grey zone where accountability vanishes. The RFS likes the optics of involvement but not the responsibility.
The result is that burns are neither fully private nor properly supervised. A muddled middle ground where responsibility vanishes into the organisational fog.
This problem has existed for ages. It is just that we are now told it is under control when it is not, and department chiefs deceive their superiors and the public when they say otherwise.
Strategic hazard reduction, mosaic burning, and landscape-scale planning have been sidelined in favour of PowerPoint presentations, media stunts, and excessively costly yet operationally ineffective aircraft.
Career bureaucrats demand that volunteers – people with jobs, families and communities of their own – take responsibility for the consequences of systemic failures of their own making. These same bureaucrats sit on Local Bushfire Management Committees, which are supposedly tasked with ensuring that burn programs are planned and implemented to protect life, property, and forests. Yet, year after year, we witness the same muddled confusion over basic responsibilities such as fire planning, hazard reduction, and inter-agency coordination. And among this litany of failures is the paucity of prescribed burning.
Even worse, inexperienced green academics contribute their absurd theories and models, which contradict the fundamental physics of fire and affect government policy decisions, harming at-risk communities and millions of hectares of forests.
A culture of avoidance and blame
What the Yankees Gap fire exposed, more than anything, is a culture of avoidance and blame. The landowner was left to fend for themselves while bureaucrats argued over who had signed what and when. The local RFS volunteers, who were under-resourced and unsupported, were expected to assess and respond to a growing wildfire with inadequate equipment and poor information while trying to earn a living at their regular jobs.
Unsurprisingly, the RFS hierarchy escaped scrutiny. In an article titled “Unseasonable winter fires”, the RFS deliberately deceived everyone when they tried to portray the Yankees Gap fire as unusual because it started early in the season in August:
In the Bega Valley, the Yankees Gap fire, burning since mid-August, roared into life once again after unseasonal hot and windy weather pushed the fire towards property near Bemboka, Numbugga and Moran’s Crossing.
However, they failed to acknowledge that the fire resulted from a failed hazard reduction burn that got out of control when bad fire weather arrived.
When the fire breached the boundary, confusion reigned. Multiple brigades arrived without coordination, and communications were patchy. Emergency calls were misrouted, and crews lacked situational awareness. Due to the delays and confusion, the fire expanded rapidly.
This pattern appears in nearly every major fire. What’s shocking is that despite significant investments in emergency management over the past 20 to 30 years, the same issues continue to resurface.
It is worth noting that this fire occurred just weeks before the official start of the declared bushfire season. Every forester and land manager in the country knows this window, the late winter–early spring transition, when landholders – particularly graziers – often light up paddocks to chase a green pick for cattle. These burns are typically rushed, poorly planned, and executed without the use of containment lines. Frequently, it’s state forest or national park staff who are left to clean up the mess before it gets out of control. We saw this in the 1939, 1967 Hobart and the 1968 eastern seaboard fires.
Death of a land management ethos
Gone are the days when land management agencies led hazard reduction with real accountability and hands-on experience. The silvicultural knowledge, local bushfire expertise, and respect for fire as a tool, not just a threat, have been diminished. In their place, we now have emergency response bureaucrats whose primary concerns are reputation management and political optics.
The Yankees Gap inquiry found failures in process, personnel, and priorities. Nobody in the RFS hierarchy took ownership, no thorough review ensued, and no one was held accountable. Moreover, it appears that no one has learned the hard lessons from a preventable fire.
This pattern repeats across major incidents. Instead of fixing the system, governments reward bureaucratic failures with increased funding and resources.
Conclusion: Reclaiming the ground truth
The Yankees Gap fire was finally contained on 27 September 2018 and declared extinguished on 8 November 2018. It reflects a broader trend in Australian land and fire management: the triumph of bureaucracy over bushcraft and politics over practice. Until we restore power and responsibility to those who understand the land, we will continue to witness these disasters unfold, each a carbon copy of the last.
It’s time to return to a model where prevention isn’t a seasonal checkbox or an afterthought, and land management isn’t a sideshow. Fires like Yankees Gap should be front-page scandals, not just for the damage they cause, but also for what they reveal about how badly we’ve lost our way.
A very sobering story, unfortunately, as you say, no accountability or responsibility leads to this situation.
More alarming is that nothing is done to prevent this from happening again.
Thanks, Rob, for sharing this with us.
Mike
An important and timely article, Robert. The focus on emergency response, rather than upon land management, is one of the most serious problems in Australian bushfire management. Of course we will always need a response capability, because fires will always start, but a responsible authority will ensure the response is more effective, cheaper and fires do less damage, if they have prepared potential firegrounds in advance. From what I have seen this is not done anywhere in NSW or Victoria.
You have also correctly drawn attention to a related problem. This is the declining level of hands-on knowledge and practical expertise about fire that is absolutely necessary if prescribed burning is to be done safely and effectively. A prescribed burn in the hands of someone without experience or professional oversight that then goes wrong, is worse than a wildfire, because it gives the whole concept of preventative burning a bad name, and plays into the hands of the anti-burners.
Things are better in WA than in NSW or Victoria as we still have a Parks and Wildlife Service who have an (almost) adequate burning program in southwest forests (despite fanatical opposition from environmentalists and academics) but the situation on private land is terrible. It is only a matter of time before there is a “Yankee Gap fire” in WA, starting on and spreading through long unburnt bush on privately owned properties.
Roger Underwood
Well put Robert. Now to tackle the 2019-2020 debacle, or just ditto?
Excellent analysis and portrayal of the human errors and institutional failings that resulted in this damaging and costly bushfire.
Have we learnt anything from this incident? Probably not. Will anything change? Probably not.
Very little fuel reduction burning is done on public lands in south-east Australia, which traps the region in a mega-fire cycle, one that easily overpowers suppression capacity. But we have a scapegoat – climate change.
The issue of fuel management on private property, especially private bushland, needs a major re-think across southern Australia. It is unrealistic and dangerous to expect private property owners to safely carry out prescribed burns in bushland without the assistance of fire and/or land management agencies, who have the knowledge and the resources.
This is a major political problem. Politicians decide to reserve land without adequate management resources, they focus on congratulating the team after suppressing a major fire, rather than preventing fires occurring. There are few KPIs for risk reduction and very little coordination across land tenures. Until politicians demand accountable management of risk the focus will be misdirected
Brilliant article – the same human errors and institutional failings happened in East Gippsland and are responsible for the 2019/2020 fire that nearly wiped out Mallacoota and destroyed property as far north as Eden – a fire that could have been stopped in it’s tracks at Shipwreck Creek.
A very thorough summary of some of the major issues that have unfolded since the RFS was created in 1997. Since the founding of the RFS, unfolding disasters have been rolled out under the politically astute commissioners and the Bush Fire Co-ordinating Committee (BFCC).
Among other things, key responsibilities of the BFCC include:
(a) is responsible for planning in relation to bush fire prevention and co-ordinated bush fire fighting, and
(b) is responsible for advising the Commissioner on bush fire prevention, mitigation and co-ordinated bush fire suppression, and
(c) has such other functions as are conferred or imposed on it by or under this or any other Act.
For over 25 years, bottom quartile performance in prevention, particularly mitigation and bushfire fighting have been a feature of NSW fire management. Outside of blaming climate change on the state’s worsening impact of high intensity mega fires, recommendations for case studies/reviews of some 2019—20 fires, including the Border Fire have been studiously ignored.
Well said, Robert.
The takeover of rural fire organizations by the paramilitary structure of urban fire services has led us to this situation. I was once part of an effective rural fire service where staff did not wear uniforms, and their credibility with landholders and the community stemmed from their demonstrated knowledge and experience. However, I witnessed ongoing pressure from the “professional” fire service to standardize the organization and bring the “cowboy” operatives into line. Once the organization was incorporated, wearing uniforms became compulsory, complete with all the accompanying decorations. As a result, landholders no longer viewed the staff as part of the community; instead, they saw them as representatives of an organization that lacked understanding of rural management and seasonal needs.
This disconnect has led to lost fires due to ignorance, indecision, and a failure to engage with local knowledge and expertise. The situation has been further aggravated by urban and rural sprawl, which has replaced experienced land managers with inexperienced hobby “farmers” who do not understand the necessity of using fire to manage forests and grasslands. Local brigades, especially at the interface, now consist of enthusiastic amateur urban expat “firefighters” who are in awe of the “professionals” and have adopted a suppression-only approach rather than focusing on mitigation. They, like the general populace, have been seduced by aerial firefighting technology and remote Incident Command System (ICS) management. It’s disheartening.
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Sums up very well the irony of current fire management whereby we have more experience and data in managing the wildfire problem in our forests than ever before but have gone seriously backwards in practice. Today it seems that the art and science of bushfire mitigation and forest management is to wrap up everything in red and green tape then do nothing.