Okay, well, we'll ask you a few questions shortly, Justin, but first of all, we're going to
do our quiz, our poll, pick the myth.
I will be safe to stay during a bushfire if I have cleared all the vegetation from around
my house.
I have a house made of brick.
I have a bunker.
I have a water tank to hide in and a sprinkler system.
My house can't protect me, not to hide in, I'll leave that bit out.
My house can't protect me from a bushfire.
Number five.
Okay, everyone's going there, my house can't protect me from a bushfire.
Okay.
We're listening to the catalyst program.
Well, what do you think?
Justin, what's the answer?
Oh, I had trouble answering the question.
Well, in a situation where the fire's bearing down on your house, you are pretty much in
a situation where your house will protect you from a bushfire because you haven't got
a second choice.
If you leave the house, you've escalated your risk 10 or 20 fold, and if you leave your
house to hop in a car, you're marginally better than leaving your house untoward.
It's a case of a house in many cases, when there is an adequate warning of an impending
fire, is your place of protection, and I guess that then drives an imperative for the owners
of those houses and the occupiers to understand the specific risk they're in and take necessary
measures to manage that risk, given that there's a fair chance they won't have a choice of
definitely not being anywhere near the place.
Yeah, Kevin.
I think there needs to be a clear distinction here between a house actively protecting you,
in a sense, as distinct from using the house for some protection while you're defending
the property.
So a lot of the mistakes that people make will be to think that the house is a safe place.
It's not necessarily, but it's probably a lower risk option, and providing you've got
a whole lot of other things in place, it will extend and provide you some enough protection
to actually survive the situation.
So we need to get away from the idea that a house is going to protect me, just without
any further work, as distinct from a house in combination with a whole lot of other actions
and options, I have a high chance of surviving.
I think we need to actually change that thought process.
True.
I mean, that's kind of your area, I guess, that people like to have these sort of simple
views of the world.
I mean, we all do.
You know, that a house is either safe or is not safe.
And getting that idea of more complex spread out risk across is quite difficult, I imagine.
Yeah, I think that's probably true, but I think there's a more visceral element to this.
That is, you will hear the experts talking around it and they're talking about the house
and risk perception, and they have this wonderful socio-technical language that they use about
it.
It's my bloody house.
I live there.
My photographs are there.
This expectation that if you provide people informed consent and they make the decisions
that they will then be logical, rational beings, in my view, and based on a lot of the interview
work and stuff, is people make bad decisions in those situations because of their emotional
attachment, because of the cultural and symbolic value of the house to them.
So I think to develop strategies that assume that the individual is a perfectly rational
creature and it's just a lack of information or a lack of technical risk assessment criteria
may not actually produce the outcome that we think it is.
So I think we have to be very clear in understanding that the emotional, symbolic and cultural
value of the house or whatever other piece of property we're talking about.
I have some colleagues that are doing some work in this area at the moment and they're
finding one of the biggest drivers of irrational behaviour is pets.
The fact that I've got to protect my horse or my dogs leads people to make the most
dumb risk-based decisions, but it's not dumb.
That's them thinking about their life and I can't imagine my life without my dog or
my horse or my photographs or those kind of things.
So I think we have to be really careful and we have to spend a long time thinking and
understanding how that drives the decision-making and trying to deal with making or minimising
the chance that those factors will distort decision-making.
The socio-technical experts don't think about that and don't craft their messages in ways
so that people aren't necessarily responding in the ways they hope.
Okay, what struck me when I saw that story the first time it went to Erin when I saw
it again there was that I also had a perception of embers floating out of the sky from these
fires and you know you would stand around the house with your hose and put that one
out and put that one out.
I guess occasionally that happens but that sort of firestorm of like a sandstorm is a
more common kind of scenario for embers in bushfire?
Yes, you in fact get both types of behaviours in different stages of the fire that the strafing
ember attack is synonymous with the high intensity bushfire arrival and once the fronts collapsed
and the winds break through that fire front they drive a lot of embers in and around things
so it just embeds itself and carrying with that is actually a lot of debris that's yet
to burn.
So debris will build up in places in the gutters and in the crevices where you may have diligently
cleaned and removed things pre-fire events.
So Kevin if you've cleared sort of an area around your house you know of 50 metres so
how are you faring a decent old bushfire?
Well I think it's really important to have some defendable space somewhere that you can
work from so it doesn't guarantee anything but at least it gives you a chance I think
there are a lot of situations where the fuel right up close to your house is the worst
offender if you like it's not the forest 50 or 100 metres away that is your major hazard
it's actually some of the fuel around close to the house so you really need to design
and maintain your property in a way so that you can have that defendable space and it's
defendable not to necessarily just protect your home but also to a safe place for you
to work from so there certainly is a need to actually remove some of the fuels around
your house but you've got to be clear that not all vegetation is necessarily, it wasn't
like it all burned it's not all major fuels so you don't actually live in a desert in
that sort of environment there are the dead components of fuel more than a lot of the
lusher green vegetation for example. What about a bunker, how useful is that really?
Well it came up a lot in the Royal Commission but it's an option that could be considered
but I guess it's... Is it the solution? It's not the solution no because A you've
got to get to the bunker, B you have to be able to survive in the bunker for the period
of time that the fire is going through there's still lots of ips and butts about a bunker
I think anyone who puts all their ips into the bunker, you've got some sort of food there
no I'm not sure but if your expectation is the bunker is it then there will almost certainly
be a problem it may be that your dog's gone astray, it may be that you've been caught
out somewhere away from your house you need another option so unless you've got multiple
options you're really running at a very severe risk of being caught in the fire.
Because I guess that once again the way humans think there is a case of like I've got a bunker
so everything's okay is that a way people may think is that a danger of that kind of
solution? Well I'll make the kind of snide comment that one man's bunker is another man's
oven. Hopefully it's the neighbors who's the oven and not yours.
Again I think it's we don't really understand necessarily how people think in panic situations
and particularly in bush fires. I think there's been a lot of work over the last couple of
years in looking at emergency evacuation of aeroplanes and I think there's a lot of valuable
stuff that we can learn from that but what we know in that research is that people panic
and that panic doesn't lead doesn't matter how good your bush fire plan is it doesn't
matter things just don't go according to the plan in most cases so I think there has to
be a lot more understanding of the social construction of risk how we actually understand
and how we value our houses and perhaps sometimes re-educating people to actually have that conversation
because when they're panicking and it's their fire just simple things like saying have you
got backups of all of your stuff and your photographs and we're outside of bush fires
because sometimes we've had some amazing stories about people wanting to stay and collect
all of their knickknacks or you know just really strange behaviours at the time it seemed
irrational but when you actually think about them in terms of the symbolic and cultural
value they actually make perfect sense. I think what I've experienced in sort of discussing
these things with people post bush fire is that the people that had really equipped themselves
with a sound understanding of bush fire behaviour and the characteristics of bush fire and
what it's capable of under different circumstances and when I say circumstances I really mean
weather contexts, whether people that were less caught out or didn't transition into
an extreme panic mode and started making a lot of irrational decisions they actually
were quite proud of themselves in being able to feel comfortable with the phases of the
fire moving past and they were on top of the time frames and of course that's in stark
contrast to the next person down the street who was less equipped in the process so I
think that there may be some home truth there that part of the solution is really getting
a clear understanding of what bush fires can do and what things around them can do under
those conditions. But we also know that there can be paradoxical
effects so for example somebody can gain a little bit of expertise and knowledge and
we've seen a number of cases where individuals had been often learnt about it and they were
itching to have a go at a fire that is their traditional original policy was if there's
a fire get the hell out of dodge that is I'm just getting out of here sometimes you might
be in a position where you can learn a little bit and you can have a false sense of mastery
in the situation and I'm not saying that's always the case but I'm saying is that these
are very complex human behaviours and that sometimes a little bit of knowledge could
even end up paradoxically producing a negative outcome and I'm not saying we don't educate
matter we don't do those things but it's really important that we understand that humans
are quite complex non-linear sources of behaviour and many of the people studying this area
are quite logical rational physicists and chemists chemists and people who have very
clear logical views of the world there's a bit of a mismatch sometimes and I think
we need to understand that much better. I think that is a very good point actually.
Why don't we have the next question I think the next myth for you guys to see if you can
spot which you're doing pretty well so far I must say I don't have to relocate I've
done everything the CFS recommends to prepare my house and property. Well gee I don't have
to relocate I've done everything too late. What did you answer? Well I guess so you can
stay there for the fire. Okay so 35% agree. 22% disagree. What do you make of that Kevin?
Well I guess context is really important here and it's hard to answer that question without
the context and I think Drew's just made a good example I guess of information or knowledge
on its own is dangerous in the sense that if you haven't got the corresponding experience
to go with it you're less well equipped and I guess we sort of in our normal operations
if you like would say we don't want people gawking at a fire event we don't want people
interfering with a describe burn operation and yet we want them to be experienced when
it comes to a wildfire situation so maybe there's an opportunity there to actually have more
community involvement in some of the describe burns I can already see that the safety and
the horror issues. But that's part of the reality I mean if we're going to live in this
fire prone environment we need to be more engaged in it and I think that's one of the
difficulties with answering a question like this is it depends very much on your experience
as well. What are your thoughts Jocelyn? Yeah I read the question in the way that well if
you did everything the CFS recommended and you were prepared I thought right okay we've
got a highly diligent member of the community they've done everything possible they've got
their degree in bushfire behaviour everything said and then I thought gee should they relocate
well it's the perfect context question is this how bad is the fire weather and I was
really pleased to see a broad distribution of answers because in fact the point that
we tend to try and prepare ourselves or educate actually assumes a range of potential fire
weathers and fire weather behaviours and as nature often reminds us that that's just a
range that you can exceed quite easily and I guess it's really important to also equip
people with an understanding of when we're in that in that slider you're actually sitting
in any given event so that you have you have some independent drivers and motivators to
be able to make a decision about relocation. Do you have anything you want to say desperately
drew or I'll move on to the next one. Oh I need to say that I find it fascinating and
this is a libertarian point of view is that people want to tell people how to live their
lives and there's a lot that came out of the bushfire commission they now shout. I'm much
more of the view that the role of the state and policy is to ensure that people make the
most informed decision possible but ultimately if somebody chooses to live in a particular
area the state can say well we may not be coming to rescue you know that is you may choose
the risk and you know I may choose the risk to live there and say well if it's going to
be a catastrophic day I'm just going into Melbourne or Adelaide or something and I'm
going to be quite happy with that risk so I think there are some really interesting philosophical
questions at the political level about the extent to which the state can actually intervene
in these decisions and what's actually desirable. Sorry I'll leave it at that. It's interesting
whether the state can say look you're in a dangerous area we won't be able to get in
and save you and sort of let you go cut you off can the state do that I can't imagine
them doing that. We better not get further down that line of argument.
