AceNewsDesk – UPDATE – A bushfire spanning tens of thousands of hectares in rugged, inaccessible country has closed a central Queensland national park for a further two weeks

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Oct.13: 2023: ABC News: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

Carnarvon Gorge, inside Carnarvon National Park, initially closed on October 7 after a bushfire burning since September 26 spread.

Bruce Higham, senior ranger for Southern Downs in Toowoomba, said the fire had burned through more than 31,000 hectares with about 7,000 of that inside the national park.

“Containment is a hard thing in this country because it’s very rugged country,” Mr Higham said.

“I imagine it’ll be a long fire … but we’ve put in control lines. We’re trying to constrict it as much as we can.”

The cause of the fire is still being investigated.

Queensland Fire and Emergency Services [QFES] crews are also coordinating water bombing and aircraft mapping for the fire today.

The park will be closed for at least another two weeks.

“It’s still on the shelves above the gorge, and it comes around behind the basin and neighbouring properties, towards the south east,” Mr Higham said.

“We’ve put in some control measures, back-burns, working with the neighbours and QFES to hold the fire and stop it going north.”

He said work had also been done to protect culturally significant sites inside the park, including a well-known Indigenous rock art site.

“We’ve done all the protection measures around the cultural sites and around the other infrastructure,” Mr Higham said.

“To prepare these sites, we remove flammable material from around the boardwalks, the leaves and the sticks and that sort of thing.”

He said the artwork, which was thousands of years old, had been through a lot of fires previously and was secure at this stage.

Although cultural burning is usually done within the park, Mr Higham said QPWS did want to do more in the future.

“We work with all the First Nations groups here and are fully onboard with it,” he said.

“We’ve been tying off our [current] burns into previous burns, our planned burns earlier this year, and that’s made our job [now] a lot easier.”

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