Okay. Well, here's your question. If there's a fire, my best option for survival will be
driving away at the first sign of smoke, standing in the middle of an empty area like an oval
or a field, sheltering in the bathroom, sheltering in the living room, getting into a pool or
a water tank.
Right, 33% is it, driving away as soon as you see smoke. Alright, I mean this is the
big one really, this one brings up that sort of big issue of you know, stay or flee. Kevin,
you go first. Well, yeah, I guess to talk around the issue a little bit, I think we've
got to appreciate that there are three major sources of energy to go into fire. The fuel
is one of them and we have a lot of emphasis on the fuel because it's something we can
manage. But the other is the energy coming from the weather itself, so the strength of
the wind, the dryness of the wind and the temperature. There's actually energy in that,
so you don't actually need much fuel to have a fire that's be lethal, if you like. And
the third one is the topography. So I guess what we're looking at here is in making some
of these decisions, we need to understand how each of those factors are playing out
here. Standing in the middle of an oval, for example, if the wind is 60 kilometres an hour
and it's 45 degrees and all those sorts of things, you still may be in a dangerous location.
On the other side of it, you've got moisture and the atmospheric stability that affect
fire behaviour and on Black Saturday we had basically no moisture because of the 13 years
of drought that we've had and we had incredible instability in the atmosphere which just allows
a convection column to form. So fire behaviour is not just all about fuel, there are at least
four other major factors and in making the decision then about what you're going to do
in terms of your response will depend on how each of those are going to affect you, where
your house is, where you happen to be at that particular time.
Okay, Justin, what are your thoughts?
It was really a choice between the lesser of five peoples here I think. There were implicit
contextual issues about why each of those things wasn't a particularly good idea under certain
circumstance. Driving away at the first sign of smoke immediately struck me as, well, once
you can see smoke, more often than not it's already too late to make a decision about
moving to a safer place. Unless you're extremely aware of where the fire is and where your
exit routes are and that that exit route is absolutely clear and you know the rate of
the fire spreading and a whole lot of things which in reality you certainly don't have.
It's usually not mobilised with that amount of information.
A bit of an issue that everyone in the town leaves when they see smoke, you're going to
have a few traffic jams.
That's true as well, so it seemed like a bit of a trap question for me.
In the middle of the field, I wouldn't be standing anywhere. I'd be inside a car before
I'd be had in the open and I'd be inside a house before I'd be in a car or out in the
open, so there's no way to be in a field. Sheltering inside a bathroom, bathrooms always
have one door. It's where a lot of people do find themselves trapped in a structural
fire and in the statistics of people that lose their lives in houses, they often are
in a bathroom and often are in fact in the bath. So they're showing that they don't have
a sense of the timeframe of a fire passing or structure. They're not allowing themselves
to continually monitor the fire behaviour through the windows of the house to recognise
a point where they gain an opportunity to move on to burn ground once the fire front
passes the ear from when the house succumbs to fire. So that's something I would have
shied away from completely. I guess the lesser of the five evils was the living room has
windows that's often more than one door and in fact I'd be roaming around the house constantly
monitoring if some windows were broken, if things were succumbing, what's happening outside
the house, etc. Water tanks and pools or that automatically says where you're out in the
open again. There are some clever techniques about surviving in those circumstances but
a hierarchy of risk would see me in a house or a more solid structure any day.
Drew?
I think it was HLMitkin who famously said, for every complex problem there's a simple
solution and it's usually wrong. Always wrong. And I think this is actually a nuanced discussion
and I think there is a tendency for people to want simplistic answers as to simple ones
and I think that's going to be part of the community education process as sitting down
and saying okay let's look at your house, let's look at the situations and having a
set of plans based on a range of scenarios. What we do know from the educational literature
around this is that people are actually able to consider multiple scenarios and have plan
A, plan B and even plan C and plan D for situation A, B, C and D and be pretty good
at deciding which of those it is. But it does mean that you have to have that dialogue and
narrative and that actually sometimes requires experts to acknowledge that they aren't.
What's wrong with the idea that my plan is, as soon as I hear it's going to be a really
hot day with a big north wind and the temperatures are rising, I'm going to head out of there?
That's mine. And a good insurance policy. I'm guessing you kind of don't think that
should be kind of what everyone should do. Everyone should make their own decisions
in a way. Should we have basically that be the prevailing advice is to get out of that?
I don't think it's a one size fits all solution and I think that way great danger lies and
I know the attraction of simplistic solutions to policy makers and educationalists and all
of that. But I think it's a wicked problem and I don't think we're going to find those
simple solutions despite the appeal and despite the co-dependency between states and community
about pretending that such reassurance can be provided.
What do you think, Kevin? Well I think one of the interesting things that came out of
the bushfire royal commission was that the council assisting the commission was very
strong on the idea that you should evacuate if there's a firing area. However, the commission
themselves, the three commissioners basically decided that's the one size fits all. It's
not going to work. So whilst there was a significant failure of the existing policy, it actually
needs to be reinforced and supported rather than necessarily thrown out in something
different and equally bad sort of put into place. So I think the royal commission, given
all the evidence they received from both experts and from people living in those firing environments
and all the time they spent thinking about this, I think came up with quite a wise decision
which is in line with what Drew's basically saying. It's got to be forces for courses.
It's got to be what's appropriate for you and your location at that time in that situation.
We often don't scale the problems. That is while it is what's called the fallacy of composition.
That is it may be good for me to depart rapidly and head out of the scene but if 100,000 people
do, that would just cook everyone in cars on the road. So there are these scaling issues
about what happens at the individual level and if we scale that up to the community level,
it may not work at all. And I don't think there's a sufficiently detailed discussion
sometimes of what would happen if everybody did one of those things and what would be
the consequences. And I'm not saying I know the answer. I'm just saying is we need to
think very carefully about these because they're complex.
Okay, well look, you guys will get your chance to answer your questions very soon. Before
that we've got a couple more questions for you. I will have sufficient time to leave
once I see smoke and or flames. Well, you've had a few clues on this one. It'll be interesting
to see what the answers are. Who's been listening?
That's the new wind. Alright and we have one more I think. If I plan to leave early, I
don't need preparation for staying in defending. Well, what do you think?
Oh, I think it's pretty wise bunch here. I think, yeah, very much so and I think one
of the things Drew was saying before is plan A, B and C. Often people think well the best
thing for me will be to do that and if that doesn't work I'll do something, you know plan
B. But in fact you actually need an equal, a number of options which are equally viable
in different circumstances. People often lock themselves into one idea that I'm going to
leave, I'm going to stay and chances are things won't turn out quite the way you expect. So
I think that's showing up in the result here that people actually sort of understand that.
Justin, you've got a final word you want to say?
No, I think the answer is speak for themselves. It's nice to hear and if it was a broad spread
I guess I'd have a lot to say.
You've all done very well. It's good to see.
And Drew?
No.
Nothing final to say.
Alright, well this is the time where you guys get to quiz them. So I think we'll give a
couple of moments maybe to get some microphones into the audience there.
Got one upstairs.
We've got a question upstairs, have we?
I've got one here.
Got one here? Okay, yeah.
Well I've got two if I can put them in there.
Maybe one at a time would be good.
Maybe one at a time.
The first thing that I feel coming out of all this discussion, I guess there's two things.
One is the householder is responsible for the fire going through their property.
So the idea that you can just leave is, I mean it's not illegal anyway.
You have to do something to prevent fire from your property.
One of the reasons that I have our one, we're increasing the population in Australia at a
time when the climate is becoming more inhospitable and we're going to push more and more people
out into suburbs in the bush in contact with forest.
Now there's an issue there about A planning and B making sure that before you sell someone
out in the bush they know what they're going into and I would have thought that that was
all part of this.
Not education or whatever, it needs to go beyond that.
Okay, so is your question maybe a legislation kind of thing with developing new properties
out in the suburbs where people are living and we've got to take fire risk into account,
I guess.
I was going to say that was one of the private recommendations of the Fire Law Commission
which was to say this needs to be part of the land titles bit on the property where you
get all the risks like there's a statement that says this is the bushfire risk, this
is what you're taking on so it's an informed consent model so people know what they're
buying into.
I think the devil's going to be in the detail of that and can you rent a consultant who'll
come to a different conclusion and there's going to be a whole bunch of economic issues
and factors that we'll have to deal with over legitimacy and validity and reliability etc
etc but that was one of the recommendations and I think you're right in identifying that
and I think so did the Commission.
Okay, your first question was about responsibility for your own property.
Anyone want to answer that one?
Well I'm not familiar enough with the legislation in South Australia.
Some foreign land.
Not Victoria anyway.
But in Victoria I guess there's a difference between whether or not a fire starts on your
property and the responsibility you have there and whether or not a fire is actually passing
through your property in which case you wouldn't necessarily have that responsibility so if
the fire starts outside your property in Victoria then you don't have any legislative responsibility
to stop it passing through your property but I'm not sure what the situation is in South
Australia here.
Is that similar?
I don't understand your responsibility for the spread of fire through your land.
If someone that you might know.
We'll get a microphone to you.
Hold on one second.
There are legal responsibilities for preventing the spread of fire through your land.
Not actually stopping the fire so it's not about firefighting it's about doing the preventative
work to protect your property and surroundings.
It's illegal to tip petrol all over your property as far as approaching.
Do we have a question upstairs?
Very back right.
Yeah my question relates to I guess it's falling on from the issue of fire prevention.
What I'll take away from me from today's presentation is that this is very complex and there are a lot of
factors that need to be considered in relation to fire safety.
But one of the things that I think is common to all of us is the prevention measures and
I think that there are some practical things that can be done to encourage clean up operations.
One of those would be to assist people to clean things up.
At the moment we've got deadlines that govern when you can burn off on your property and
up until that deadline people are encouraged to do that.
But once within the fire zone and you can't burn off then it does become more difficult
to clean your property.
There are a lot of incentives that local councils and other government authorities could actually
make to assist people to clean their property by way of disposing of things to local dumps
and encouraging curbside collection or other ways of disposing of waste and other fuels
around properties.
Who would like to address that one?
I'm just going to say that these are always cost benefit analysis issues.
That is it's easy to solve a problem by throwing money at it.
The question is what bank for your buck are you getting and what's the cost for the risk reduction
versus the risk reduction that you're getting.
I think in many cases communities don't encourage the kind of initiatives you're talking about
because the opportunity cost of devoting the money to that particular area means it has
to be taken away from somewhere else or we have to increase services and charges.
Again it's an ultimately very difficult political question.
I don't think we live in an era where throw money at the problem is a viable strategy
anymore.
There are limited resources and we have to think of much smarter and cleverer ways.
I think how do we create programs that create incentives on the behavioural level for people
to want to clean up their properties or to start earlier so they don't wait until after
the fire stuff done.
I think we have to think about how do we invest the resources, not just go to the just pay
for it model.
I think it's a really difficult issue because as soon as you spend the money on that the
aged care facility down the road or the disabled people or somebody else will say that money
would be better spent on risk reduction with our group rather than your group.
If you've reduced the fuel then that has already had an effect on eliminating the risk.
I understand that but if you think about it from a risk perspective the chances of the
fire coming through that individual's property at the micro level are very low.
The cost of doing that to everybody and all the time, sometimes the cost of the community
to that can actually outweigh the costs of having the fire.
There are very complex decisions that have to be made here and most people don't think
about risk in that way.
It's just, oh, that's the problem, fix it.
But you may actually create a different problem because now you haven't got enough money to
go and buy the firefighting equipment or something else so you're always balancing off these very
complex equations.
And I don't think there are necessarily just simple, just do this and it will all go away.
These are complex and what I refer to as wicked problems that need quite complicated and
multidisciplinary groups and a much more participative sense of community to solve them.
I think that's the challenge.
Did you want to add something to that, Kevin?
Yeah, look, I think what this is bringing out is, and Drew's just sort of summarised that at the very end there,
it's very important that we're pretty good at putting red trucks out on the road and doing the water
and the suppression thing and we're good at the planning, we're good at providing information,
but what we haven't been so good at is really getting that social interaction going.
And I think a lot of what you're sort of suggesting in a way requires what Drew's just sort of finished up with
is basically getting some agreement about how important is this compared with other values and so on.
There's a real social issue there.
And I guess coming from Victoria, I would say that our fire agencies haven't been fantastic at that.
They can put up websites, I'll produce booklets, I'll produce lots of information,
but dealing at the social level we're not very good at and I guess the bushfire CRC,
when it got going in 2003, one of the areas that it sort of concentrated on was this social side of it
and we're really in just gone out of prep into grade one in terms of what we're doing there.
It's just so complex for us and unless we go down that social line,
we're never going to solve this problem. It's not a physical issue.
It's actually a social problem that we've got.
Okay, question downstairs here.
I'm wondering just to kind of ram home the messages from tonight.
What myths you think you've busted here?
We should really ask the audience.
I guess we've busted the hiding in the bathroom.
I think a lot of people thought that was a good place to hide and we've learned that isn't.
Maybe the houses don't automatically become really dangerous places to be at a certain point.
They're a reliable temporary refuge and certainly a better option than most others when you need it,
when you're taking those last minute decisions.
Yeah, look, I think one of the myths that we've started to deal with
and one of the myths is going to be the really big challenges over the next decade,
which is that the emergency services model that has predominated in this area over the last 50 to 100 years
I think needs to be supplemented and it's one where we move from a position of
I am going to be rescued to one where the community sees themselves as part of the firefighting team.
So I don't have to necessarily don all the fancy equipment and go to the sausage sizzle
or do all that on a Wednesday night or whatever that happens to be.
But there will be a sense of that if there's a community partnership around this
we need to work on it together as a group and we will move to a notion
I would see where the traditional fire brigades that have been worked with the CMS
will become more of community development units
and will play a role in building and developing community and educational roles
and not just we are the heroes coming to rescue you on the day.
There's always going to be a role for that but there's going to be a much broader community development process
that I think when we get to that we will have busted the biggest myths that we need to bust.
Okay, upstairs, fire away.
One of the things mentioned was the lack of information to household owners
of where the fire is, what it's doing, those sorts of things.
Is there almost a need for some sort of real time bush fire tracking system
maybe a bit like bomb.gov or Google map style system that people can go to
even during a fire there's usually still some sort of internet connection via your phone
or you can call up someone or something along those lines
some way of being able to track information and get more of it to people with that help.
Would you like to tackle that one?
I'll go straight out strong on that and the answer is yes.
I've been busily building a fire behaviour model if you like
and models are useful in an extent but good information is always better than any good modelling
and I guess we took 18 months in a Royal Commission to find out
we're still finding out what actually happened on Black Saturday
we need to know that within minutes if you like
and it needs to be from all sorts of platforms.
Some of that technology is already used in some of the military applications
that's used in sort of terrorist type situations.
We're really not using it very well and I've got to say
even the fire agencies, the firefighters don't really know
they haven't got the information to hand out it's not that they're withholding it
and so that's an area that we've really got to work on
is getting where the triple O calls are coming from
the power lines of going to fault where the talk back radio people are providing messages
and they use Twitter and all sorts of things
I mean we're just not harnessing that it's scary but the technology's there
we can do that.
And is that something you think should be available to the public
as well as to the sort of firefighting community?
This is a partnership where we're actually trying to solve this problem together
so we've got to share the information but the job for if you like the agencies
is to filter and validate some of that information rather
than throw out a whole lot of information.
One of the issues of using some of the...
we had Google Maps running for example on Black Saturday
well you get all sorts of information.
Some of it's useful, some of it's not
and as an individual you can't make that assessment
that we need systems in place to actually be able to do some of that filtering.
So is there a due date since the last one?
That's twice a day.
That's twice a day as the satellite laps around so it's not quite quick enough.
Can I make a comment here that I think there's going to be a lot of discussion
about the use of technology to target information to people.
We actually know a lot from research in other areas about this.
So for example if you imagine the scenario where we have some super-duper text messaging system
that sends you a text and says,
Danger Will Robinson or something equivalent to that.
What would happen in the event that the signal distribution,
that is the signal to noise ratio became too high,
that is too many people were alerted
and they go, oh that's the 10th time I've had that in a while.
And the last nine times I got it, it wasn't actually,
didn't mean anything and people have what are called in complacency errors.
What about if you don't get a message?
Oh I must be safe.
So I think we have to be really sophisticated in our understanding
is that these are very human systems.
And yes give everybody a text message.
Well that might work but then again it might not
and we do have very clear understandings of how over informing
and under informing and how people respond to the history of information
being provided to them actually distorts their decision making
and not necessarily in good ways.
And I think that there's a lot more than just considering live information feeds
about impending events.
I think there's a huge amount that technology can offer
mobilizing information that informs communities to assess their own risks.
And it's about, you know, imagine if you could click on Google Earth
and click on your neighbour's property and see how they're,
how, what bushfire rating your neighbour's property had
and how that share, you could imagine how.
You could understand whether you think if your neighbour's house burnt down
whether yours is going to burn down because they're only this far apart.
There's sort of knowledge and spatial knowledge
and mobilizing knowledge that where you're giving everything,
putting it all in the public domain and mobilizing people
to make the more informed decisions about their own risks.
And that's real time and static information.
You're suggesting that maybe the neighbour's house would burn down
and the control burn maybe late at night.
Now I've forgotten whether we're taking questions from upstairs or downstairs now,
upstairs maybe.
Well, I'm wondering if there's any scientific evidence that shows us
that fire in native vegetation is less dangerous or more dangerous
than fire in non-native vegetation?
Yeah, interesting question. Any interesting answers?
Yeah, the, um, yeah, it's all different.
There's really good non-native vegetation
and there's really bad non-native vegetation
and there's good and bad, yeah, there's good and bad at both.
So it's not a clear division?
They overlap and mix up quite a bit, so...
Not a clear answer.
As a general rule, native vegetation tends to be more fire adapted than non-native
because non-native tends to fall into a category of coming from regions
that aren't fire-prone or have had to evolve as a fire adapted species.
I guess all I'd, Justin's right on all of that.
The only thing I'd add there, for example, is if you want to compare a pine plantation
to a native forest, for example, one of the things that is quite distinctive
about, say, native euclid forest is the amount of fire brand
that comes out of the spotting characteristics of it.
And that helps the fire coming out of native forest
move across quite fragmented or discontinuous fuels
and helps it propagate.
Whereas people see fire in a pine plantation, it's really quite spectacular.
You've got lots of flames, a lot of radiation, but it doesn't spot anywhere near as much.
So it's quite bad if you're up close to it,
but you don't actually need to move very far away from a pine plantation, for example.
So even though it's really firing and burns well,
it's the distance away you need to be to be in an equally safe area is much closer.
But you've got to look at all, you know, I guess you've got the olives and all the rest of it.
It depends very much on the species and how they're arranged and where they are.
Okay, downstairs, do we have another question?
We've probably got time for two, two more questions, I think.
One upstairs, one downstairs.
My question is about managing when the technology fails.
Probably what many people forget is that when a fire is coming,
you probably don't have any electricity,
and therefore a whole lot of your systems fail.
Are there any comment on the sorts of things people should do
to anticipate managing without the resources they might otherwise think would work?
Okay, how do you get by without the electricity and the fire?
Yeah, in sort of talking to people post-fire,
it's worrying that something like the power turning off
or the water pressure dwindling to nothing
is one of the triggers for our panic.
And it's unfortunate that that is a trigger for panic
because it's one of the clear basic doctrines
that people should understand about fire and fire events
is you most likely will lose those while the fire is approaching.
And you must have all the relevant means and understanding to be capable
without those in place.
So I think it comes back to the knowledge that sits in the person's head
is probably their most powerful tool that they have in those circumstances.
And understanding fire behaviour and what fire events are all about
is the real essential pieces of the puzzle to help them act rationally
and effectively in taking the most appropriate course of actions
that minimise their life risk.
Okay, time for one last question upstairs.
Thank you very much.
We've seen on the video quite a lot of different firefighting suits being applied
from the good CFS kind of gear to the thongs and stubbies.
Do you want to know which is best?
No, no. I've got that sorted, I think.
One of the myths that I think I've heard around the place is that
if you are in a situation in not very much protective gear
is to actually dash yourself in water and then go on fighting the fire.
What's the science in that?
And do you finish up with a lot of scolds and get treated for that trouble?
Worse than the fire.
Okay, that sounds like a good myth.
To bust or not to bust?
So maybe clarify, you're talking about wet clothes or bare skin with water?
I think yeah, clothes with wet clothes on them.
That's a good one.
We've got nude firefighters and clothes.
Nude wet ones, that's right.
Bare skin, wet or dry, not much difference, so you're pretty much stuck.
Wet clothes versus dry clothes depends on the circumstance
and the actual type of clothing, so it's not a clear answer at all.
The water is useful, it gives you a latent heat of aphorisation and it cools
and there's lots of wind, so you're being cooled at the same time as the radiant heat is heating you up.
So no, there's no real clear answer
and you're not putting yourself in an extremely dangerous situation
by getting wet accidentally or on purpose, so don't be alarmed if you are wet.
Okay, well look, that's it for now.
Could you please thank these three guys?
