Eltham bushfire could kill thousands: report

A Victorian fire expert is warning thousands of people would die or be seriously injured if a Black Saturday type bushfire started north of Eltham on Melbourne's outskirts.

David Packham was a senior research fellow at Monash University's Geography and Environmental Science Department and has retired to Gippsland.

He accurately predicted the intensity and destructive potential of the Black Saturday bushfires in the week before the event and for years, has been warning authorities about dangerous bushfire fuel loads in Victoria's forests.

Mr Packham has co-authored a new report with Eltham resident Tim Malseed, saying residents would be trapped in their homes or on the narrow roads leading out of the area in a catastrophic bushfire.

The report says the Victorian Government's centralised emergency alert system would not work in a big fire and the only way to save lives would be to dramatically reduce forest fuels.

"When fires are hot and fast-moving, the idea that we can get some nice warning and give people a few hours to move out of the area is an absolute myth," Mr Packham said.

"It won't happen. There will be people who are late evacuating, there will be people who evacuate and die during the evacuation when their homes remain untouched.

"We know that in areas like the Dandenongs it would take up to eight hours to evacuate people through the roundabouts and that's without the roads closing because of fallen trees and powerlines."

The Eltham area was spared from the destructive Black Saturday bushfires that killed 173 people in 2009 by an early and unexpected wind change that pushed the fire through Kinglake.

Mr Packham says if the wind had remained from the north, thousands of homes in the built-up residential area would have been destroyed and thousands of lives would have been lost.

In the report, he says that situation has not changed and if anything fuel loads have increased.

"The thing about Black Saturday, (is) it did not go through a highly populated area," Mr Packham said.

"If it had and went through the Eltham area proper, then you've got to multiply the deaths and the trauma by some factor, probably five or six, maybe even 10 times because of the population density.

"There is no doubt that if you have more people in an area there is more risk of life loss."

Both Mr Packham and Mr Malseed, representing concerned Eltham ratepayers, blame a succession of state planning ministers from both sides of government for ignoring the issue.

One of the key recommendations of their report is for bushfire mitigation to be included in the state planning portfolio.

It also recommends an extreme bushfire risk analysis for an area at least 10 kilometres north and west of Eltham and to dramatically reduce forest fuels in that area.

Mr Packham has long campaigned for a fuel reduction burning regime in Victoria similar to Western Australia, where forest areas are burnt regularly in a patchwork pattern across the landscape.

The report recommends a revision of the government's leave early policy and to improve emergency vehicle access and egress roads leading to the one bridge crossing the Yarra River.