Alpine Bushfires
Ron Janas · 32 min
A retired police officer and CFA volunteer with 32 years of service reveals how bureaucratic failures during Australia's 2019-2020 bushfires endangered the very communities emergency systems were meant to protect — and what must change.
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Ron Janas has lived in the Buffalo River Valley for 34 years. He's a retired police officer, a volunteer firefighter with 32 years in the CFA, and now a councillor with Alpine Shire. When the 2019 bushfires approached from the north, Ron did what he'd always done: he showed up. He worked 12-hour shifts protecting the pine plantations that employ people in his community. He attended community meetings to make sure people understood what was happening and knew someone had their back.
But the bureaucracy that followed the fires revealed something that troubles him more than the flames themselves. Evacuation orders kept changing. Residents were told to leave at 1 or 2 a.m., driving through smoke-filled roads with wildlife fleeing the fire, sent to unfamiliar towns instead of sheltering locally with people they knew. Firefighters who'd fought all night came back to roadblocks that turned them away from their own homes. Farmers worried about their stock; neighbours asked people to stay behind to check on properties. The messages were unclear, the orders contradictory, and the cost in stress and community tension was real.
Two years later, a simple upgrade to the fire station's community hall, adding a basic female toilet, became a two-year bureaucratic nightmare with costs that exploded. The locals could have finished it in months.
Ron isn't dwelling in what was lost. He's focused on what communities need to do before the next fire comes: write a plan, know your local conditions, understand that the country isn't the city. But he's also clear about what emergency systems need to learn: clear orders, safe local shelter, and respect for the people who live there and know it best.
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