[Speaker: Les Vearing]

Every Bush fire that we believe to be human caused, we investigate. So even some fires that are eventually work out to be lightning caused fires, we're still investigate them. There's lots of little things out in the forest that tell us a story.

Every tree will tell us a story. We can determine, looking at the tree, exactly which way the wind was blowing when a fire burnt past that tree. So we're in the Kimbo cotton forests to the southeast of Bendigo today, and we're investigating a fire that we suspect is probably being started by a faulty vehicle or a trailer.

During the early 90s, I lived near Castlemaine and we had a series of fires being lit down there in the forest.I started investigating those probably investigated about 60 or 70 fires around Castlemaine.

They've been all deliberately lit until we eventually caught the person. In fact there was 2 actually, people were lighting them and eventually caught them both.

The role of a fire investigator is to determine the origin and cause of the fire. We try and work our way back to where the fire actually started. And then if we can work out how it started and then the really big fires, we then do a what we call a path and impact assessment.

When I first started, which was 46 years ago, the biggest majority of fires were caused by lightning. But over the years that's changed and in later years we're getting a lot more fires caused by arsonists, but also get a lot more fire started by campfire.

Generally the higher the fire danger. So it's really hot and windy. The fires will spread much faster and time we get there, the fire's quite big, but sometimes when the, when the fire's burning fast, it'll actually give us better indicators of fire spread.

It's a very rewarding job to our to come out into a forest and use the skills you're taught in your training course and, and develop over the years to trace that back to where that fire started.

We've got a lot of arson fires to actually catch that person and apprehend them and to protect our communities.

Page last updated: 25/06/25