• Home /
• BCM News and Events /
• BCM news /
• Australian bushfires cause rethink of preparedness policies

Australian bushfires cause rethink of preparedness policies

19 February 2009

This month, Victoria in Australia has experienced the worst bush fires ever with over 700 homes destroyed and a final death toll expected to be as high as 300.

The current national advice is the so-called 'stay-in-the-home' bushfire policy - which encourages you to remain and defend your home provided you are prepared and physically able to cope. The scale of death and destruction of the recent bushfires has however provoked a questioning of this policy. Victoria Premier John Brumby is leading the calls for the stay-in-the-home policy to be reviewed. The Attorney-General Robert McClelland agreed saying, "I think we really do need to look at our early warning systems".

The rationale behind the policy is that if you have a fire plan in place - that is you have a water source and a pump that isn't power supply dependent and your house is ember proofed - it is safer to stay and let the front pass over than to leave at the last moment. It is true that most houses lost to bushfires were burnt because of defendable ember strikes rather than direct contact with the fire, and most deaths have been due to last minute evacuations.

Fire service chiefs came out strongly in defence of the existing approach. Euan Ferguson, president of the Australasian Fire Authorities Council defended the policy saying "at this stage, there is no evidence that our policy is ill-founded. It is well founded in both experience and scientific research".

However, academics were divided, with crisis management experts tending to prefer evacuation plans. Research scientist Justin Leonard, who studies community vulnerability to bushfires at Australia 's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), backed the proposition that home was relatively safer, stating that "it was rare to find a death that is associated with a capable person actively defending their structure".

Adding to the confusion is the fact that the role of the police force is not well understood; the authority to order people to leave their homes is different across Australia and civil liberties groups insist that the police should not be able to remove people against their will.

What everyone is in agreement about is that people need to decide early whether to leave or defend their homes. Unfortunately one of the commonest reasons that people change their mind and flee their home when they had intended to stay is because, with no direct experience of fire, they are not prepared psychologically. Another fire chief commented that actively defending a property from fire was safer than leaving late in a car.

Once the wait for the final death toll is over, there will be another agonising wait as experts drill through the statistics to learn whether the Australian bushfire preparedness policy saved lives or not.

�

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, author Nick Carson, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.