Feel free to use these quotes in your stories.  Any further comments will be posted here. If you would like to speak to an expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us on (08) 7120 8666 or by email.

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Prof David Bowman, Professor of Forest Ecology in the School of Plant Science at the University of Tasmania

“It is true that we are expecting more bushfires under climate change – but bushfires are part of the fabric of Australian environment – a continent ecology wrought by fire, storm, flood and drought. So any single bushfire needs to be put into a historical and ecological context. The catch is we have a fairly sketchy historical record which makes it difficult to detect changes in bushfire activity – nonetheless we scientists are working on this aspect of our national history reaching back 100s of years in time. Also humans, particularly in high population concentrations add to the risk of fire by adding ignitions on dangerous days – hot windy weather that follows seasonal drought.  So while it is apparently perverse to have bushfires on the west while floods on the east and storms on the north of the continent it really is characteristic of this tough old land.  The key issue is Australians need to  come to accept that these natural challenges are part of the deal of living in Australia – we still need to learn how to adapt to these challenges and recognise the environment is shaping us as much as we are shaping the environment.”

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Mr David Bruce, from the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (CRC)

“The current fires in Western Australia are consistent with the national seasonal bushfire forecast that the Bushfire CRC released last October. Even though many other parts of Australia have received plenty of rainfall over the past year south-west Western Australia had its driest winter on record, following many years of drought. So even with some good rain in recent months it was only going to take a blast of hot summer weather and wind to bring back conditions where serious bushfires can occur. This is a timely reminder to much of Australia that fire and flood are a regular occurrence and no one should be complacent about preparing our response agencies and our local communities as best as possible over the long term, no matter what the current weather conditions may be.”

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The report is accessible online at www.royalcommission.vic.gov.au and at www.vic.gov.au (and also in hard copy form at Information Victoria, 505 Little Collins Street, Melbourne).

There is also a media release online.

Please let us know if you have trouble accessing the report and we will email it to you.

The State Government plans to provide its response to the final report within a few weeks of its release.

Here we have compiled reactions to the report from experts in the areas of bushfire and arson.

If you would like to speak to an expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us on (08) 8207 7415 or by email.

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David Packham is an adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at Monash University, Victoria

“The Royal Commission has been a very useful exercise because it has collected in one place a whole spectrum of opinions and information that will serve scholars for years ahead.

The people of Victoria spent about $100,000,000 on this process. We will wait and see whether we have got value for our efforts.

There are two really interesting recommendations.

One is the recommendation on fuel reduction burning where it refers to five per cent of the total state land area, and that is the minimum that can achieve any effect. But the government, in their response to the council assisting of the Royal Commission, have already rejected that recommendation. However, they may change their response after today’s cabinet meeting. I would anticipate that if they did achieve the five per cent we would see effectively a decrease of about 25 to 50 per cent of the deaths we see in this sort of disaster, but it won’t be until we see about a 10 to 12 per cent fuel reduction per year that we will reduce the problem to bearable proportions and make the forests healthy and safe.

The other really interesting recommendation is the last one, where the Royal Commission reflects on itself, which implies that the Commission has had trouble being a Royal Commission.

The last recommendation says the state consider the development of legislation for the conduct of inquiries in Victoria – in part, the conduct of Royal Commissions.

Most of the other recommendations are useful, but will make little difference to the overall threat of bushfires in Victoria.”

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Professor David Bowman works in Forest Ecology at The University of Tasmania’s School of Plant Sciences

“The Bushfire Royal Commission report makes a series of very sensible recommendations that can form the basis for social adaptation to the threat of increasingly serious bushfires in Australia. The threat of more severe bushfires is driven by increased settlement into fire prone bushland areas and climate change causing more dangerous fire weather.

I was pleased to see the report highlight the need for evidence-based evaluations of bushfire management and policies, and investment into independent research across a broad spectrum of disciplines. The real test of the impact of the Bushfire Royal Commission, however, will be how the raft of recommendations are translated into action. There are numerous barriers to their implementation, but the most obvious is political will, institutional inertia, and adequate resourcing, particularly in the longer-term. Without sustained investment the opportunity to refine approaches for people to co-exist with highly-flammable landscapes may be lost. We need to critically evaluate what works and why and this will require trialing the recommendations, and accepting that they are not the last word on sustainable bushfire management – we must be open to changing our perspectives of living with bushfires in the light of new evidence.

It would be sad to see this report join the queue of past reports and inquiries into bushfire disasters that have only had limited impact of our adaptation to living in a land of bushfires. There is little doubt that the way Australian communities live with bushfires will be increasing tested in the near term – this report provides important framework for Australians to step up to this challenge. The next steps are implementation, commitment for the long haul and willingness to accept a culture of change.”

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Professor John Handmer is Director of the Centre for Risk and Community Safety at RMIT University, Melbourne

“After exhaustive examination, the Royal Commission has not dumped the ‘stay or go’ approach as many had predicted, concluding ‘that the central tenets … remain sound’. Instead it advocates emphasis on a wide range of safety related strategies, including the development of evacuation plans and community refuges or shelters, and acknowledges that staying and defending may be a sound option in some circumstances.

However, recommendations for refuges or shelters, and those concerning ‘vulnerable’ people, may prove challenging for government as they reverse the trend to shift most of the responsibility onto the people at risk. Until fairly recently, there were designated refuges and places understood locally to offer relative safety. These had disappeared well before Black Saturday, and in some areas local government has indicated that it will close down completely on Code Red days, effectively abandoning the community. This recommendation places responsibility back onto government and is probably well aligned with community expectations. The Commission also recommends that fire agencies take more responsibility for those who are especially vulnerable.

Some recommendations are likely to be more than challenging such as that to remove development from ‘unacceptable high bushfire risk’ areas. This makes good sense for risk management, but development tends to win out and fire and emergency services are expected to deal with the risks.

The Commission’s report covers most aspects of the bushfire risk, and has thankfully avoided the option of emphasising a single strategy, such as massive fuel reduction or agency amalgamation, as the solution.”

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Mae Proudley is a bushfire researcher in the Gender, Leadership and Social Sustainability (Glass) Research Unit at Monash University, Victoria

“The recommendation to revise Victoria’s bushfire safety policy acknowledges the failure of the ‘stay or go’ policy which assumed homogeneity across all locations irrespective of the geographic landscape and the capacities and needs of particular communities. Policy applied generally has limited impact; the CFA’s own research (back in 1999) was critical of the prescriptive and authoritarian approach to community education. For bushfire community education programs to be successful there must be an understanding of the dynamics and complexities of families and how they react under the pressure of a disaster. The heavy emphasis on preparing, staying and defending undermined the option of leaving early.

The lack of transparency surrounding the levels of funding allocated to community education programs needs to be addressed. Comprehensive and tailored community engagement and education in high bushfire risk areas is a priority. It will be interesting to see how the Government supports and resources this challenging task.

It is good that more research, particularly social research, has been recommended. The little contemporary social science research conducted prior to Black Saturday in this country was often partly or fully funded by fire agencies and/or related organisations. Can there be a guarantee of independence and objectivity for future fire research in Australia?”

(If you need to use a title for Mae, please use Ms)

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Professor James Ogloff is Director of the Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science at Monash University and Director of Psychological Services at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health

“It was heartening to see that the Royal Commission recognised the importance of deliberately lit bushfires – an often overlooked component of bushfire prevention. In Volume II, Chapter 5, the Commissioners provided a helpful overview of the main issues in understanding deliberately lit fires and note the importance of ongoing work in the area.

Recommendation 25 notes the need for a coordinated state-wide approach to arson prevention by Victoria Police which should include ‘a research program aimed at refining arson prevention and detection strategies.’ This reflects the ongoing need to increase our understanding of arsonists to help prevent and detect deliberately lit bushfires. It would have been beneficial for the recommendation to have gone beyond the efforts of Victoria Police since many agencies are relevant to arson prevention (e.g; corrections, forensic and public mental health services).

Recommendation 36 also noted the importance of collecting data and ‘evaluating current and proposed programs in order to identify and share best-practice approaches’ to reduce bushfire arson in Australia. Similarly, Recommendation 65 highlights the importance of ongoing research and evaluation.

It is now critical that the State Government assist with funding appropriate research initiatives and practices to address the very important area of bushfire arson.”

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David Peterson is Principal Bushfire Consultant with Eco Logical Australia’s Central Coast Office in New South Wales. He is a specialist in bushfire protection planning and design and is a nationally certified practitioner

“I have been following the inquiry on and off especially as it pertains to changes required in the Victorian system for building and development, the development of risk planning for communities, and broad area fuel management. As an industry consultant based in NSW and predominantly working within the NSW system, it has been interesting to relate the Commission recommendations to the legislative requirements and the process of duty of care in our state.

Much of the recommendations relating to the three areas mentioned above will bring the state of Victoria in line with the approach taken in assessing bushfire attack to building and development in NSW. The recommendations rely on the word bushfire ‘risk’ often which implies a more involved assessment of bushfire impact and development of mitigation measures for new buildings. NSW assumes a worst case fire scenario which some may say is conservative however ‘risk’ elements of lower bushfire threat and extreme bushfire threat can be overlooked. The application of ‘risk’ is a positive for the state of Victoria although I believe that the recommendations provide too much reliance on the bushfire prone land mapping to identify the risk. This can only really be done at a site specific level.

I commend the recommendations on the development of risk plans for existing communities. This is an exercise that brings a systematic and prioritised approach to risk treatments in a larger area. Similarly, the recommendations relating to fuel management by the way of prescribed burning are also pragmatic and refer to research of those ecological communities where more understanding is required. I don’t believe providing an area based target for prescribed burning will achieve the intended goal.

I also commend the recommendations on changes to AS 3959-2009 and the BCA. Hopefully review of these documents can happen sooner rather than later.”

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Len Foster is Chairman of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre

“The Royal Commission final report indicates how much more Australians need to learn about living in one of the three most fire prone regions in the world.

Recommendation 65 calls for a permanent national centre for bushfire research with reasonable surety of long-term funding. Importantly it says the centre should be a collaboration of all Australian jurisdictions to support pure, applied and long-term research in the physical, biological and social sciences relevant to bushfires. Australia’s fire services have agreed that, consistent with this recommendation, the Bushfire CRC will transition into the Australasian Fire Research Institute. With support from the Australian Government and from partner contributions, the Institute will provide Australia and New Zealand with a much needed long-term, sustainable centre for bushfire research.

The transition to this Australasian Institute recognises the need to work together to protect communities all over Australia from the threat of bushfires. While Victoria’s involvement is critical to this research program, the only sensible approach is on a national basis, with strong international links. We all realise that all the answers to future community safety cannot be found in Victoria alone. An Australasian Fire Research Institute will give us the new knowledge required for community safety.”

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Professor Ross Bradstock is Director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, and a Member of the Expert Panel on Land and Fuel Management, 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission

“The recommendations, in particular no. 56, are both unsurprising and challenging. The recommendation for establishment of 5% annual burning target for public land reiterates the principal recommendation of the ENRIC Inquiry in 2008. This was to be anticipated and will bolster the impetus to undertake more fuel reduction activity. Nonetheless the Commission, as with other inquiries does not deal explicitly with the issue of cost and feasibility of implementation of such a target. Such costings have proved to be elusive, yet they are vital. At present there are few coherent data that establish the financial and resource implications of such a target. This gives scope to the Government to consider but alter the level of treatment it decides to adopt in response. Ultimately a lift in fuel reduction burning is generally deemed to needed, but the promulgation of targets without thorough analysis of costs and benefits will do little to quell ongoing debate. While there is some work now available to indicate benefit (i.e. risk may be reduced appreciably but substantial residual risk will remain) costings are elusive and may make such a target prohibitive in the long-term. Greater transparency in this regard is urgently needed to help the community to make judgements about claims and counter-claims on burning targets. The commission has been useful in airing the issues but ultimately only the community can decide how much risk it can afford to mitigate, through reduction and the other broad range of measures.”

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Ross Brogan is a Lecturer and Course Co-ordinator of Fire Investigation subjects at Charles Sturt University, New South Wales

“In regard to the recommendations overall, the Terms of Reference for the Commission included the fact that ‘prevention’ be taken into consideration with most matters investigated by the Commission. Within the recommendations (67 in all), there are no recommendations regarding the use or provision of professional, trained and qualified fire investigators able to identify and determine (accurately) the origin of the fire and the cause of that fire. By accurately determining the origin and cause, prevention measures can be established, audited or verified as accurate, or efficient (as in prevention programmes Rec. #35 & #36).

Without accurate, professionally trained investigators, the origin and cause cannot be guaranteed and any prevention programmes or legal action taken against persons charged (or accused) with either negligence or deliberate fire lighting (arson) will be suspect and cannot be guaranteed to successfully prevent any similar incidents occurring in the future. Fire investigators must be provided with training that is up-to-date, comprehensive and professionally recognised by Australian and/or world-renowned authorities so that a uniform approach is adopted and established for investigators from fire and police services to work together as a team and a determination is reached that satisfies all interests.

Recommendations 35 and 36 on arson prevention programmes and training indicate that there should be prevention programmes established and implemented for the purposes of Arson Prevention and that these programmes are evaluated and any current or proposed programmes are audited to provide best practice for use in bushfire incidents. There is no mention of evaluation of these programmes from data indicating cause of the fire/s – without verification of cause of a fire there can be no accurate determination as to whether that programme has worked, is successful or valid for the area or situation that it has been established within. Data has to be gathered to indicate cause of the fire and whether the programme has been successful according to that cause data, without cause data then the programme viability cannot be guaranteed.”

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Associate Professor Robert Heath is a crisis management expert at the University of South Australia. Here he comments on the announcement by the Victorian Government that they have scrapped the stay or go policy in favour of evacuation on ‘code red’ days where catastrophic fires are likely.

On some levels the Victorian Government changes to urge/direct evacuation as the only choice under Code Red (Catastrophic fire) may lead to more loss of property and life than would superficially appear.

Given an evaluation that covers the entire state of Victoria, to where do ALL Victorians evacuate?

Given that evacuation is recommended the night before a Catastrophic Fire condition, how can a respondent respond with no actual fire?

The one obvious level on which this change may work is where a fire on ground already exists (which has been the case) and extreme conditions indicate a megafire or catastrophe the next day.

A number of scenarios are apparently not considered.

The first is that despite such warnings, respondents wait virtually until they see the fire before evacuating – waiting to see whether conditions change. This is why we tend always to have a number of fatalities found within motor vehicles in major fire events. Cognitively I see the change thus having minimal impact, although the recency of the 2009 fires may prompt earlier and more evacuation responses than “normal” (until 3 or more years pass without an extreme event).

Duty of care problems will still remain. What happens where in the process of following the evacuation directive/recommendation on a forecast (next day) event, life or property is damaged or lost? Under the same circumstances, what happens when people are evacuated into a subsequent fire danger with damage/loss of life/property? What happens when the event by classification becomes not catastrophic but people evacuate on the conditional warning and subsequently lose property that may have been arguably protected/saved by their presence at the site being evacuated (not only from fire but any storm or theft)? Who will compensate for loss of business should the catastrophe fail to eventuate?

Whether compulsory in nature or not, agency/government directions to do a given act carry responsibility for outcomes.

People will continue to die in catastrophic fires. We need to ensure that a reduction in the number that may so die is not simply a dispersion of death process — wherein fewer die from direct catastrophic fire sources while increasing the number that may die from other sources (vehicle accidents, for example).

Ultimately, real risk of loss due to catastrophic fire management needs four conditions to be met:

1/ Acceptance by those with higher exposure to catastrophic bushfire/wildfire risk that they are highly exposed and are thus likely to lose property and possibly life in remaining in such exposure.

2/ Enforcement of appropriate insurance such that those who are underinsured understand they will lose the value of property loss (rather than hope that a generous government and even more generous public will cover the cost of such lifestyles of the grossly underinsured or non-insured.

3/ Appropriate and parallel legislation that- as fairly as possible demarks safety for people (and property) and for the environment and nature. This demarcation may indicate, for example, levels of countermeasures that can be clearly understood – from nature only (no protection) through to full protection with large no-growth and clearance zones required.

4/ Use of a clear rule of thumb – evacuate if people are old, incapacitated, young, unprepared, feeling incapable of protecting self, others, property and doing so on early warnings with even moderate fires. Structures are easier to replace than people.

There are examples even in catastrophic fires of staying and reducing the consequent losses, of staying and surviving, and of the reverse of losing property and life. The 2009 Victorian bushfire was no different. What we need to clearly comprehend is that staying to fight requires more capability than most sites and people have (and often a deal of luck). Without having experienced the physical and all-senses assault of a moderate or worse fire, however, most people cannot really comprehend the states of thought and consequent actions they may have until, in some cases, too late.

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An area of northern New South Wales, extending into Queensland, and much of the southwest Land Division of Western Australia also expect above average fire potential. Conditions in Tasmania indicate normal to below normal fire potential, and below-normal levels of fire activity are expected in Central Australia

The map Fire Potential Outlook for Australia 2009-2010 and state by state breakdowns are available here

Feel free to use these quotes in your stories. If you would like to speak to an expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us on (08) 7120 8666 *note new number* or by email.

Gary Morgan is CEO of the Bushfire CRC

“In the southeast there has been a long period of drought, and in northern NSW and southeast Queensland, apart from the coastal strip, there have been below normal winter rains. Above normal potential is expected in both these regions, and is also anticipated over much of southwest Western Australia due to good wintertime grass growth. In Tasmania above-average winter rains mean below-average potential.

The fire potential has been estimated by taking account of many factors, not just weather and climate. The fire potential also relates to fuel abundance and availability, recent fire history and the amount of firefighting resources available in a particular area.”

Professor David Bowman is Professor of Forest Ecology at The University of Tasmania

“This prediction is very useful in helping people in bushland areas in south east Australia prepare for the coming summer, indeed coming summers. All the evidence is that bushfire risk in increasing due to the sustained warming and drying trend. It seems the rules of the game are changing – serious fires are moving from a rare once a generation event to a more common part of life in Australia. Communities must adapt quickly to this change and such predictions from the Bushfire CRC are an important part of this process. Denial of the danger or looking for someone to blame wont remove the threat rather material and psychological preparation is crucial.”

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.