Ash Wednesday aerial photography

by Leith Hillard, CFA Public Affairs

Over the past six years, CFA’s GIS (Geographical Information System) team has been gradually scanning film from black and white aerial photographs of the Ash Wednesday fire areas to convert them to a digital format. With considerable assistance from colleagues at the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at Deakin University, who are also CFA volunteers, the project is now complete. The team has also scanned photographs that were taken by the original ground teams that investigated the fires on behalf of CFA.

The Otways after Ash Wednesday. Click on the image for more photos.

The aerial film has been scanned at a resolution of 2 microns, the resulting digital imagery from the Otways, East Trentham/Mt Macedon, Cudgee-Ballangiech, Belgrave Heights / Upper Beaconsfield and Cockatoo fires will soon be widely available for viewing and analysis in GIS platforms.

GIS Manager Mark Garvey had long been aware of the existence of the aging film and thought it should be made available for research. “Ash Wednesday is still the benchmark in terms of relatively recent widespread devastation,” he says. “There were 400 houses destroyed in the 2003 Canberra fires but more than six times that number were lost on Ash Wednesday.

“Our aim is to ultimately make the images available on Victorian Government digital library servers and perhaps also through other collections such as the National Library.”

Researchers will also be able to use the images for comparative studies. The Fairhaven photos from 1983, for example, mark exactly where the destroyed houses were. Current images show housing developments encroaching much further into the bush with its resultant fire risk. Other images from Mt Macedon have a topographical overlay to demonstrate fire spread.

The project has been mostly funded by CFA while some processing has been funded by Deakin University and DSE Fire and Emergency Management.