Science Blog

Response to the Royal Commission Interim Report into the Victorian Bushfires

Associate Professor Robert Heath
Crisis management expert at the University of South Australia
20 August 2009

The 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission has just released its interim report into the ‘Black Saturday’ Victorian bushfires. The Commission was established on 16 February to investigate the causes and responses to the bushfires which swept through parts of Victoria in late January and February 2009. The Final Report is due July 2010.

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To respond in any detail worth providing to a 240+ page Interim Report with 54 recommendations takes some space. There are no surprises given the amount of information coming from the proceedings and generally presented from one source or another prior to the report publication. Likewise, in general, the recommendations are reasonable and make sense. Indeed most reflect points I forwarded to the Victorian Premier’s Office in the days and weeks immediately following the 7th-8th February 2009.The three commissioners appear to have done their best within the parameters of the Commission and worked with integrity and zeal.

Having said this, there are some issues and concerns that can be raised from the recommendations and text found in the report.

Recommendations -- Some Issues and Concerns

Broadly, the recommendations from the chapter 4 (warnings) are not unexpected. Indeed many of the states since February 7 have been working separately and together to develop better warning systems and approaches and to improving communications. I applaud the recommendations covering the need for uniformity and consistency of message and message content that is emphasised in this and the next chapter. However, there is to some extent an absence of complete understanding of the nature of crisis for all involved and the operational and psychological impacts this has on management decision-making and communications inside and outside a given organisation or set of organisations.

Crisis (and region-sized natural disasters) by definition mean missing and suspect information along with demands that exceed the resources available. Succinctly, there is a difference between incidents (a singular or set of definable situations) and a multi-focal event that also may threaten the lives of respondents. Few are trained to cope at the strategic (command) end to deal with the number and variety of apparently instantaneous decisions needed is crisis situations. Moreover, response agencies by their own culture (and protocols and systems designed to effectively manage incidents) can find difficulties in effectively and quickly transforming to an almost out-of-control situation.

There are also concerns about the nature, specificity and the capability of warnings and information provision. Public and individual expectations are not being managed particularly well in our communities. Perhaps this is due to political or agency lack of will to bluntly tell the public that they may be on their own if a situation/event/disaster is big enough. We could double the assets, resources, and personnel and still not necessarily guarantee the safety of all property and all people.

The report and recommendations appear to have an overemphasis on technical fixes as a complete solution to warnings and information (which may be due to the commissioning parameters). Regional natural disasters will have missing, uncertain and indeed even poorly updated information. Given the nature of the most serious fires and the climactic conditions on February 7, communications are likely to fail given atmospheric, fire impact, potential failure of power supply, distortion and loss of telecommunications systems.

Moreover there needs to be more specific definition about what is meant by warnings. In the days preceding the fire, efforts were made across the media to warn people of the possible danger of the coming day. The trouble is that management and commentators fail to understand some basic human behaviour. Many people do not like leaving their property which could be vandalised or burgled or somehow lost and not lost if they had stayed. The need to wait for, or find, or clear actions with other members of families or communities leads to waiting and indecision. Others feel they would be embarrassed among community or family should they leave (or leave and nothing eventuates). Others hesitate because of lost time or income. In short, people find reasons not to act quickly. This is true anywhere in the world.

What this means is that even with better warnings and better education people will be reluctant to go. A broad rule-of-thumb (the Pareto Principle) leads to a suggestion that about 80% of a given population will obey an order to Stay or go (depending, of course, on how compulsory that order may be and how forcefully such an order may be enforced).

Adding extra numeric data such as Danger Indices may not necessarily lead to any better behaviour. There is some social research, for example, about behaviour in hurricanes and tornadoes in America which appears to indicate mire complacency due to vague understanding of the facts attached to events that meet a given scale value.

In major wildfire or bushfire situations the amount of smoke surrounding a large blaze tends to diminish any ability to accurately assess immediate danger. Smoke is everywhere at least as a haze and even as a horizon cloud. Moreover, waiting till almost the last minute has in itself dangers as was stated in warning advertisements and statements prior to this fire. Last minute evacuations/relocations can place people into road hazard accidents and even into fire – there are very few direct straight roads with little vegetation around them and six lanes wide.

There are issues with the beliefs possibly surrounding recommendation to make information and the alarms more consistent and more timely and up-to-date.

1. Access to communications in a region under immediate and obvious threat may be more limited than expected.
2. People may not be attending their communication tools or these tools may not be on or functional.
3. An increase in hits or contacts on websites may make it almost impossible for updates to be made should those updates be also coming through the same telecommunications system.
4. No matter how many resources we make available, when a real crisis situation arises information access and provision tends to fail. This impacts on updating information.
5. Specific local conditions are likely to be site specific and variable and thus impossible to predict in order for timely (last minute) information.

The use of sirens. While the recommendation to use sirens is acceptable, we need to understand that sirens may not work -- power supply failure or local conditions can adversely impact such systems. How many sirens would be needed in a locality? Sirens are often used to assemble fire-fighters and would probably have been used earlier in the action. Should the fire service members already be away, who is available to actually to sound the siren? When sirens are used, people often go out on the sound of the siren to assess conditions and often make a decision that is dangerous to them. Should a community expect a siren then absence of the siren may negatively impact consequent behaviour. At what point/timeline moment is the siren sounded to mean what action by the community members?

Chapter 6 (Relocation). Setting aside semantic arguments about the use of relocation and evacuation (perhaps yet another palliative rather than an action word-use – do not frighten people), there are some duty of care and placement concerns over use of relocations to refuges. This by no means argues against having refuges but rather points out that we need to understand the physical needs of such sites and possible negative cognitive consequences of people further delaying “go” decisions because there exists a local refuge nearby.

One need for any refuge is to have ample parking space nearby so that people can get themselves to the place of safety. Perhaps we could effectively use some of the federal government infrastructure financing to re-construct safer refuge in school structures. Refuges should be identified and even reconstructed to meet more than one hazard for refuges to be effective and worthwhile investments. Finally, I would like to see a more precise definition of relocation -- is this during an incident or is this prior to an incident in which case we could have numbers of people at that refuge for a number of hours if not a number of days or even weeks.

Stay or go. This concept seems to be the most debated issue. On one level there is nothing wrong with the concept -- indeed, as was identified even in Australia in research into bushfires, property can be saved and protected by residents remaining to protect that property. This is the case with small far less intense “local” fires. There are probably some properties and people who survived the Victorian bushfires who did in fact stay and fight – so we do need to see the numbers of survivors not just of deaths inside dwellings.

The most important factor of stay or go is that decision needs to be made early -- probably at least 6 hours to 24 hours before the fire is in the immediate vicinity. Waiting until a fire front is within 10 to 15 km from a site in these conditions makes any departure/evacuation/relocation decision dangerous.

There are recommendations for further education and the question is whether further education (while in itself appropriate and applaudable) will really change significant activity by individuals or communities. As noted above, there is a reluctance to move. Part of the problem is that people expect that they have their own "safety net" or "protector" that will either come and warn or protect them. In significantly large crisis situations such as major or mega-fires this may be very unlikely.

Chapter 8 (Risk). Many of the recommendations are quite appropriate and are indeed being seriously tested in many of the States of Australia.

One issue with such efforts, however, is the general tendency of risk management in evaluating risk to rely too much on historic technical knowledge and data. Not enough coverage is given behavioural and perceptual risk which means the risk evaluation will not lead necessarily to public protection strategies that work. Technical data is also historic – and thus not necessarily full or accessible or as reliable as the data may suggest. Moreover, such data alone does not reflect climate change and geographical/landform changes over time and thus may be (criminally) misleading.

Those undertaking or performing such community evaluations are likely to be inexperienced and non-expert to properly do current and suggested regional/community hazard risk assessments – and this may also weaken the utility and probity of such information alone. Having noted this, any risk-based effort is better than none.

Chapter 9 (incident management). The recommendations are generally appropriate. We do need to note that changes in duties for any particular role/personnel really need to lead to changes in the roles and responsibilities of many within a given team. Without proper and close support I doubt whether many people will become interested in being Incident Manages/Controllers if they have to undertake the extended duties on their own.

Chapter 10 (emergency management). Again, the broad recommendations made here are appropriate. Having said this, there is probably a need to rethink even the basic elements of state emergency plans. This is because of the speed with which incidents happen and the broader and more complex situations in which response agencies, the State, and those caught in a serious region sized crisis are exposed. There are more potential critical situations that may be triggered by an original crisis – from chemical contamination and disease through to dealing with survivors over time.

Certainly the recommendations suggesting that training and amplification for senior emergency roles and activities are good. Personally, I have pressed on both the Prime Minister's Office and the Federal Attorney General's Office the need for better training, advisory services, and mentoring for those people in our nation who may be charged with managing the response and the recovery in regional or bigger crisis situations. I provided a detailed plan in which very quickly numbers of people from across all agencies may gain greater insight to both crisis management and the interaction and inter-operability of their agencies. Categorically, managing in a crisis situation is unlike normal management in organisations. I do in particular support recommendations made in Chapter 11 (Commonwealth response).

Other Issues. There are at least four issues still needing attention either by this commission or by the agencies and governments in Australia.

1. Making compatible environmental regulation and human safety. This is probably an each way activity in the sense that some regulation needs to be mollified so that people can make themselves and their property safer, and in other places people may need to be warned and even accept that the environment takes precedent over their presence – which means they may lose their dwelling every 10-29 years and build and act accordingly. This also has connections with fuel burning -- and Australians need to understand that Australia (over millennia) has had a natural cycle of regeneration of vegetation by fire.

2. Construction of onsite/individual dwelling below ground safety rooms. While not addressed in the interim report, this issue has had much public and continued discussion. There are some concerns in terms of duty of care in such an approach (and I would not wish to be a legislator, regulation enforcer, builder, or owner of any such legislated structure as there is an implicit belief about safety and duty of care should such structures fail.

For example use of below ground structures as exemplified by tornado shelters may be inappropriate. Concrete bunkers with steel doors may end up acting as ovens, may eventually lose oxygen, and may be sealed by distortion of door frames. Over the last century in Victoria, safety "holes" have proved useful -- from caves and mine entrances through to sawdust pits and excavated holes or “scrapes”. We need to remember that the primary need for fire safety in such situations is the deflection and reduction of radiant heat.

3. Regulation and desire. While people may wish a beautiful treescape lifestyle, this has an equal downside from falling timber in storms and increased fire danger. We need to legislatively balance environmental protection needs with public and individual access and use of high-risk areas.

4. Manage public and individual expectations more appropriately. Somewhere and at sometime someone will have to “bite the bullet” and admit that the public cannot always be made safe in all situations. One element missing from most of the report is the accountability and responsibility of individuals in crisis-level situations. Lifestyle and media sources tend to suggest that everything should be safe and “unchanging” and non-threatening – and this fundamentally is not necessarily so.

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