Brookton arson suspected

A Brookton farmer has lost part of his estimated four-tonne wheat crop, in what is being described as an arson attack last Thursday afternoon.

Murray Hall, who leases the property east of town with his brother Ian, said a neighbouring farmer had alerted him to the first blaze on Thursday at about 2pm.

Mr Hall, who is also coincidently the Shire of Brookton's chief bush fire control officer, said about 50 local volunteers, and their fire units turned out to fight the fires.

He praised the local volunteers who attended the fire, saying the strength of the local bush fire brigade and the dedication of community members had been on show last Thursday.

"Since the 1997 Brookton fires, we are all pretty well equipped for firefighting," he said.

"While losing a wheat crop is certainly bad news, the silver lining to this is that the show of support from our community was overwhelming. Brookton has a great firefighting community."

Mr Hall said the fire happened in two tranches.

"The first fire was out within 40 minutes, then the next one started about half an hour after that," he said. "We had just put that out and we were sitting down for the debriefing, then another fire started coming at us.

"We had to re-route and go back out and swirl around the fire again.

"The biggest concern I had was that there were three or four farm homesteads in the direct line of the fire. In fact, we stopped the fire just 800m before the first homestead."

Mr Hal said he believed four different fires had been lit on the property, all joining up to create the two separate fire incidents.

He estimated 17 or 18ha were lost in total during the fires.

"We were lucky with the weather conditions on that day," he said.

"The high humidity combined with the slightly cooler conditions made things a little easier, but the wind was certainly up.

"We had winds of around 25-38kms."

Mr Hall said the fire was contained in a long strip.

"Interestingly, had the second fire been lit first, it would have been a bad situation," he said.

"It could have got into some rangelands, but by that time we had so many volunteers who had responded that we could get that one under control.

Mr Hall said some damage had been done to fences, but the crop had been insured and assessors had already inspected the property.