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# Drones in the reserve, rakes in the backyard: getting ready for summer, gently
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/ready-for-fire-season/
- Published: 2026-11-07T07:36:49.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-07T07:42:51.000Z
- Description: Logan City Council is using drones to start the small, careful burns that clear dry fuel from its reserves. In backyards nearby, people are doing their own version with a rake, a ladder and a neighbour.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Sustainable Living, People, Conservation, All stories

In Logan, south of Brisbane, the city council has found a faster, gentler way to get its bushland ready for summer. Planned burns, the small, cool fires that clear dry fuel from parks and reserves, are now being started by drone. Each drone carries up to 450 fire starters the size of a ping pong ball and places them to within two metres of a set point, reaching steep, thick country more quickly than a crew on foot, and only on days when the weather is right. In September the drones helped with a planned burn across 44 hectares of Birnam Range Reserve, and Mayor Jon Raven says the precision keeps a safe corridor open so wildlife can keep moving through the bush as the work goes on. Further north, near Bundaberg, the Burnett Mary Regional Group's Cool Burn Squad does the same job the old way, with matches and patience, grounded in Indigenous cool burning practice that goes back many centuries. "There's no need to be greedy and rush it," says Conway Burns, who has thirty years of it behind him.

![Neighbours clearing autumn leaves from their front gardens, Forest Hills, New York.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/06/0d067be9-327f-4730-b9c3-5f0cdd2bc6fa/content/images/2026/11/neighbours-clearing-autumn-leaves-from-their-front-gardens-forest-hill.jpg)

Neighbours clearing autumn leaves from their front gardens, Forest Hills, New York. Photograph: Neighbours clearing autumn leaves from their front gardens, Forest Hills, New York by Peter Dutton, via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 2.0.

For most of us, getting ready is gentler still, and it looks a lot like a weekend in the garden. Fire services describe a ready home as one with gutters clear of leaves, and the dry leaves, long grass and twigs close to the house raked, mown and carted away; South Australia's Country Fire Service talks about the first twenty metres. Logan's mayor says much the same, roofs and gutters cleared and the grass kept down, and New South Wales' Rural Fire Service suggests every household has a plan and keeps an eye on the daily fire rating. It is the kind of job that goes faster with company: a Saturday morning, a trailer of garden waste shared between two houses, a cup of tea over the fence. Clever drones over the reserve, careful hands in the bush and neighbours with rakes in the backyard, all doing the same quiet thing before summer arrives.

### Sources and links

Our short take: the Cool Burn Squad story is by Tom Hartley for ABC 7.30 (9 September 2026). The Logan drone trial is from Logan City Council, as published on Australian Rural and Regional News (16 September 2026). Home preparation from the NSW Rural Fire Service and the SA Country Fire Service. Photographs: as credited in captions.

- [ABC News, Cultural burning protecting Australia from catastrophic fires, by Tom Hartley](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-09/cultural-burning-protecting-australia-from-catastrophic-fires/107135290) Bucca, the squad, how a burn works, every quote.
- [Australian Rural and Regional News, Drones add spark to planned burns](https://arr.news/2026/09/16/drones-add-spark-to-planned-burns/) 450 spheres, two metre accuracy, 44 ha at Birnam Range Reserve, the wildlife corridor, Mayor Jon Raven.
- [NSW Rural Fire Service, Plan and prepare](https://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/plan-and-prepare) Survival plan, fire danger ratings, preparing your home.
- [SA Country Fire Service, Preparing your home for bushfires](https://cfs.sa.gov.au/public/redirect.jsp?id=53518) Twenty metres of mown, raked, weeded ground (confirm the clean URL at build).