Black Saturday revelations demand a complete rethink of fire science
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The Bushfires Royal Commission has junked CFA policy. “Stay and defend” is essentially out, selective evacuation, refuges and new warning systems are in. No surprise there. 5000 pages of Commission transcripts spelled it out. You have to admire the Commission’s lawyers. Knowing little of wildfire, they slashed through bureaucratic obfuscation and laid bare the CFA’s deadly policies. With unfailing politeness, counsel gave fire “scientists” all the rope they needed to tie their research to those discredited policies. Just in time, the Commission deftly reversed the potentially fatal error of excluding victims from its hearings. Harrowing personal experience was quietly juxtaposed to the hubris of “experts”. But journalists didn’t bother to read the evidence. Their abject failure to analyse the fires was exemplified by Virginia Trioli on the ABC’s Breakfast news (2nd July). She interviewed Kevin Tolhurst, apparently unaware he was one of the architects of CFA policy. Tolhurst repeated the bizarre rationalisations which have amazed the Commission: “the community was not adequately prepared… despite all the warnings”. What warnings? What preparation? He wasn’t asked. The weird CFA notion that “people have to be fully empowered” was trotted out again. Tolhurst’s solution is to “make sure people are well-equipped” and “more self-reliant”. Shame they weren’t ready to fight the fires. It’s really their fault then. But if the CFA can’t defend houses in forest towns in firestorms, how can householders with mops? Neither Tolhurst nor Trioli grasped this elementary fact. No wonder there’s been little media reaction to Premier Brumby’s description of the CFA leadership’s performance on Black Saturday as “outstanding”. The royal commissioners, barely visible under masses of damning evidence suggesting less than outstanding achievement by fire agencies, are probably on the floor of a locked motel room somewhere, surrounded by empty bottles. Five months on, Black Saturday has at last got some attention from intellectuals. Well, one article. 7000 words in The Monthly, by Robert Manne. The fires narrowly missed his town, otherwise the piece may never have been written. We’ve had acres of colour journalism and a daily ration of Royal Commission served up sans comment, but precious little analysis. Less analysis in fact than the recent editorial boning at The Monthly. Magazines such as The Spectator and The Monthly did briefly cover the fires. Cathartic reactions to shock. Sincere but shallow. Only Crikey showed sustained interest. Seven or eight writers weighed in. Manne sticks to one crucial issue. “Why We Weren’t Warned” is a trenchant if prolix expose of the deplorable failure of the authorities to warn those in mortal danger on 7 February. Everything he relates is on the public record, either in the media or Commission transcripts. The fire agencies knew that once the Kilmore East fire crossed the Hume highway it could not be stopped. No need for predictive maps. Just like all the other “unprecedented” Victorian firestorms, the fires raced south east, then north east with the wind change. The smoke plumes showed up as rain on the weather bureau’s online map all day. I watched them. Fingers of death pointed at their victims, hours in advance. Black Saturday was not, as Manne and the media say, the worst peacetime disaster in Australian history. Over 400 died in 1899 when Cyclone Mahina struck north of Cooktown, wiping out the pearling fleet. About 100 aborigines drowned, some while rescuing sailors, when a fifteen metre tidal wave surged inland. If 400 white Sydneysiders had drowned in 1899, you can be sure that would be etched in the collective memory. But Black Saturday would have been much worse if the fires had reached the Dandenongs. It’s only a matter of time before yet another “unprecedented” firestorm strikes our sprawling bushurbia. The charitable view of Black Saturday is that confusion reigned in the fire agencies. Cumbersome bureaucracy and overload did cause chaos, but the sinister truth is that official policy caused many deaths. If you assume people are safest at home when wildfire strikes, you can understand why police ordered people evacuating “late” to return to Pine Ridge Road, Kinglake. The Hainsworth family’s evidence encapsulates the tragedy. The CFA had told them informally that their street was a death trap. On the day, there were no warnings. They saw smoke nearby and decided to leave. They met a neighbour returning by car with her three children. She said “You can’t get out. You’ve got to go home.” I said, “What are you talking about?” She said, “They’ve blocked the road. They’ve told me to turn around and go home. That’s the safest place to go.” The Hainsworths left regardless. Their neighbours went to another house in the street. The owner begged them to leave with him. His house was already burning. They refused. He left and survived. The obedient family stayed, and died in the house. Manne, like all the media, says CFA volunteers “fought the fires gallantly and selflessly”. They did not. They are not allowed to fight raging fire fronts. This policy is correct and only nine years old. Before that, volunteers were regularly burned to death in what I dubbed in the 1990s the Gallipoli Syndrome. Most people are unaware of the CFA’s true role. This contributed to the catastrophe. The CFA is not the fire brigade. If they can’t knock out a bad fire in ten minutes, they revert to plan B, which is to contain wildfire within safe perimeters and suppress it on the less dangerous flanks. There’s no Plan C because the only thing which stops firestorms is the weather. Why weren’t people warned? Manne asks why police road blocks were in place well before any fire threat was apparent to residents. The answer is that the CFA knew where the fire would go and advised their subordinates, the police, accordingly. He refers to a “peculiar ideological mindset” which inhibits the CFA issuing the necessary warnings. Ideological is perhaps not the right word. The rigid mindset derives from twenty-five years of policy evolution, backed by dubious “fire science”, on which the entire quasi-military structure of the CFA is based. CFA thinking is simple: if you haven’t left “early”, you must “activate your fire plan” and defend your house, predefined as a “safe refuge.” Leaving “late” is not an option. Warnings just tell you to get ready, and being “ready” doesn’t help much in a firestorm. There was actually plenty of time for people to evacuate most places, but in Manne’s words “at every level the professional members of the CFA spoke and thought like bureaucrats”. Policy generated rules and rules had to be obeyed. “Conformity to rules was…the enemy of judgement, common sense and moral responsibility,” says Manne. He’s dead right. On Black Saturday, the idiotic rules were enforced. No authority dared to encroach on another’s jurisdiction. Some individuals did break ranks. The resolute CFA captain in Gippsland who sounded a siren is well-known. It’s less well-known that he was censured for his temerity. The police in Marysville were braver. They ignored the fatal rules and led residents to safety as the firestorm hit. The media never followed up these clues which hint at dysfunctional bureaucracy. The media took Katherine Haynes’ research on bushfire fatalities at face value for weeks. This study justified the “stay and defend” policy, but dates from 2008, long after the policy was implemented. Haynes says that not one “prepared” person out of the 552 “civilians” killed in wildfire in Australia since 1900 died while defending a defendable structure. They either fled too late, or died while unwisely defending outside or “passively sheltering”. Manne misses the point here. Haynes’ error is one of fundamental logic. She assumes structures are refuges, therefore you stay inside until the fire front “passes”, then emerge to douse embers. But in severe wildfire, houses are fuel, not refuge. It is more logical to assume people flee because their house is burning or about to, and that people die fighting outside because the house is burning or about to, and that people die inside because they would be killed quicker if they came out. The 113 who died inside houses on Black Saturday would probably have died from radiant heat if they’d emerged. CFA advice denies the basic physics of severe wildfire. Radiant heat can kill people at a range of over 100 metres and also ignite houses. Ember blizzard trumps mops. The evidence of Karen Ward is a case in point. The Wards were professionally prepared and their house was in a bare 17 acre paddock. At 500 metres the fire burned Ward’s skin. They left and survived. Their house burned in ten minutes. The Commission says fire authorities “were not prepared for Black Saturday.” Wrong. The fire authorities were fully prepared. They executed a flawed policy badly. Manne describes the ideological root of “stay and defend” as mutual obligation, a “neo-liberal cliche”. Citizens and government fight fire in a “post-modern” partnership, he says. Perhaps the explanation is simpler: the CFA no longer fight running fires head-on, but to admit this would undermine its very reason for existence, so responsibility is shifted to households. The CFA loves the term “empowerment”. People are “empowered” by taking “responsibility”. The “family” (not the school, factory or shop) cleans up leaves and buys mops. The media (and Manne) ignored bureaucratic conduct after the fires, but the sham “empowerment of families” was starker than on Black Saturday itself. Unlike the humane common sense evident after Ash Wednesday, the state often behaved in a fascistic manner in the aftermath of Feb. 7th. Property rights were trampled, entry was banned for weeks, sites were bulldozed without consultation, journalists were harassed. What does this tell us about social democracy today? It would be the height of absurdity for the government not to replace fire chiefs immediately, yet Premier Brumby announced on 2nd July that fire chiefs “couldn’t have done more” on Black Saturday. Hello? The system crumbled in the crisis because it was based on false assumptions. The fire agencies and their coterie of fire “scientists” are still wedded to these assumptions, as Tolhurst made clear today. One hopes the Commission comprehends the conceptual shambles, because the media doesn’t. Brumby could only spray gloss on Black Saturday because the media conspicuously abdicated any critical role after Feb. 7th. Nobody excavated the toxic waste dump of disguised ideology and dubious research on which sits the whole jerry-built structure. All that newspaper hype about investigative journalism, professionalism vs online slovenliness, editorial chastity vs internet onanists, disciplined research vs opinionated rants, terse yet beautiful prose vs the dribbling garrulity of cyberspace. You could count the bushfire op-ed pieces in the last three months on the fingers of an ancient logger’s hand. If hometown mass death through state incompetence is too hard/dull for the media, then we may as well focus fulltime on troubled footballers. If the fire bureaucrats stay, reform will be compromised. It’s not simply a matter of re-jigging warnings and refuges for the next firestorm. General fire policy and fire science have to be rigorously examined. There’s the rub. Without continuous critical review of wildfire policy by an independent bushfire commission, intellectuals and the media, expect fire agencies and fire science to sink back into the dangerous obscurity from which they were dragged by Black Saturday and Justice Teague. |
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11 Comments
This second article by Frank Campbell takes a different line from his first - published a couple of weeks ago.
This time Campbell focuses on the human deaths and the possible reason for the deaths and loses sight of the fires, and the reasons for the fires. Had the fires been just as fierce, but had not caused a single human death, we would have had no Royal Commission and no articles like this. This article is important and informative, but it’s about government, bureaucracy and disaster management; it has little to say about bushfires, climate change, ecology or even “fire science”. I’m disappointed.
Keith: Along with others, I’ve already said quite a bit about ecology, “controlled burning” etc on Crikey, and in my two submissions to the Royal Commission. Last time I looked, those submissions (30,000 words) were not up on the commission website yet (along with many other large and institutional submissions).
You’re right to say that if the firestorm had killed nobody there’d be no debate. We owe it to the dead to force a debate, because fire policies have been developed for 25 years without public scrutiny. It will happen again. This is our one chance to generate debate. How hard this is is starkly underlined by Brumby’s grotesque praise for the “leadership” of the fire agencies on Black Saturday: an “outstanding” performance, he said. With that attitude, fire science and fire policy may quickly fall off the radar again.
Thankyou. A great read. I’ll share it with my science journalism students.
Frank: You write that “Property rights were trampled, entry was banned for weeks, sites were bulldozed without consultation, journalists were harrassed. What does this tell us about social democracy today?” In the light of experience it’s a good question.
On the other hand you seem to be advocating compulsory evacuation. What makes you think that officialdom is going to do better before a fire than after it? The truly facist approach is to deny people the democratic right to make up their own minds as to whether they stay or leave.
It seems to me that the crux of the problem is how to provide easily accessible and adequate information in a timely manner. In other words, communication. As a country bumpkin it astounds me that in weather conditions unprecedented in living memory so many people in the ranges seem to have been quite oblivious to what was going on right outside their doors until it was far too late: tank tops, shorts and thongs in some instances. God save us. Give them the message about fire (perhaps that starts first with education in our schools) but don’t deny anyone the right to choose. Just let us make sure that in future people have the facts as known at that time.
I would take Brendon Jarrett’s implied criticism of many of these people even further. No one wants to say it or hear it but what is wrong with them? Even up here in Brisbane we could see that a huge conflagration was bearing down on them, both the day before and the day it happened. These fires reoccur with regularity so why on earth were they not better prepared? Running around the yard at the last moment in shorts and thongs? With houses utterly unprepared to withstand an ember firestorm? Naked glass windows! Unprotected eaves. Whirlybirds that bring the embers directly into the unprotected ceiling space where nothing can then stop them? Inadequate water storage and unprotected plastic tubing and no independently powered pumping system. I completely reject that with a little preparation houses cannot be made vastly more resistant — sure, not totally fireproof but at least to give refuge long enough to allow the storm to pass. There were plenty of examples where the house did exactly that. It is the great Australian complacency — home owners unwilling to spend 5-10% of the value of their house to protect it and themselves. I would say that it should be made mandatory except that whenever OHS or any other bureaucracy gets involved it is usually over-the-top thus prohibitively expensive and unnecessary (because they do not want to cop any blame etc etc).
As for the disfunctional bureaucracy, is anyone stupid enough to think that it could ever be anything else. It is exactly the outcome when managerialism is applied. In today’s world it is inescapable. The inquiry is part of the same problem. The populace want to blame anyone but themselves, and I’ll bet they are busy rebuilding the same fire-prone houses that got burnt down. I agree that the last thing we need is some quasi-fascist legislation enforcing evacuations according to politicized bureaucracies whose prime objective is ensuring they do not cop the blame. But CSIRO certainly has a simple set of guidelines on the minimum requirements for a ember-resistant house. These should be provided to every susceptible householder so that in the future it will be their personal responsibility if they decide to do absolutely nothing (as most who died did). When did we become so dumb as a nation?
Frank
Thank you for the courtesy of a reply. Just to clarify my criticism of your article, we need - more than anything else - forward-looking ideas to preserve the forests of SE Australia and return them to their natural state of fierce fires once every 300-400 years. Of course I am concerned about the loss of human lives (and livestock and native birds and animals) in February. I think you are pointing in the right direction: the human deaths were largely due to many factors (some of these listed by Michael James above), but rather than focussing on allocating blame on individuals, let’s look at the many, many factors that contributed to the severity of the fires (that’s one thing) and the loss of human life (that’s quite another). I don’t want to see any individual hung out to dry unless they are unequivocably culpable. Here in Canberra there were mistakes made in the 2003 fires; one of these was the stripping back - in the name of cost-cutting - of professional forest staff and replacing a team of professionals by a smaller number of cheaper bureaucratic administrators with fancy titles but little technical understanding. Had these budget cuts not been made in the years leading up to 2003 there would have been a different culture, different skills, a knowledge of the similar fire in the 1950s and different priorities - and, I suspect, a vastly different outcome. But we tried to pin the blame on a few individuals who made wrong decisions in the days leading up to (and on) 18 January 2003. This was most unfair as they all appear to have done their level best.
Been on the road…
Brendon: Quite a few people assume that I’m in favour of compulsory evacuation- but I’m not- just haven’t made myself clear…
Compulsory evac. can lead to all sorts of complications, starting with the David Packhams of this world - he told the R.Commission that there’d be ‘fun” if anyone tried to make him leave. No govt. authority has the time or inclination to drag people out of their homes in an emergency. It’s unfair on the officials, for a start. If I was a cop, I’d leave the stubborn ones to their own devices.
As in the USA, there is a strong macho element in rural Oz. The “Don’t Mess With Texas” syndrome. It’s a well-recognised fact in fire sociology that men often want to fight the fire while women prefer discretion as the better part of valour. No matter how experienced or well-prepared you are, there’s always a chance you’ll die. If you’re not there, you won’t. As Justice Teague said, “My fire plan is not to be there.”
Then there’s the matter of the scale of the evac.: Brumby’s claim about “one to two million” having to be evacuated in a Black Sat. emergency is histrionic nonsense. Half the population of Melbourne? Pull the other one. As an aside, Brumby’s calculated and repeated snubbing of the Commission is bizarre, but presumably reflects an agenda. The fire “leadership” were “outstanding” on Black Sat. he said, plus several pre-emptions of the RC over policy. Thus far it appears as if Brumby is undermining the Commission because he supports the very mind-set within the fire agencies that made Black Sat. as bad as it was: anti-evac., pro-stay and defend etc.
Anyway, the sleight of hand used by Brumby, Esplin et al is to conjure up “evacuation” as a mass rush for the exit, one twisting mountain road. Therefore: horror. Reality: “evacuation” has several levels. Most people in most circumstances will go only a short distance to a neighbourhood shelter, or stay on site in a private bunker. It depends on good warnings. On a firestorm day many people will have left the day before. Failing that they could go to public safe areas, either nearby or regional, early on the morning of the firestorm day. A fail-safe system should be developed, i.e. if there are no warnings or they are too late to get well away, then people have to rely on local refuges. There should be a hierarchy of refuges, as for eg in Topanga Canyon in L.A.
But all of the above is predicated (as you imply Brendon) on a realistic understanding of severe fire. At the moment, the CFA gives unrealistic advice about severe fire, and worse advice on the ability of ordinary citizens to fight it at home. The annual idiocy of people running around like headless chooks, wearing thongs and shorts, pointing a tiny plastic hose into a strong wind , has to be tackled head-on. No point just assuming people are too stupid or too urban. If they had DVDs of incineration in wildfire instead of soporific scenes of a contented, grazing family picking up leaves while ticking off their to-do list (batteries, drink lotsa water, keep calm…), then the message will start to sink in.
There’s a long list of specifics which will be necessary- “preparation” has to be re-defined. The true role of the CFA explained (its not the fire brigade). Who fights the fire at home? What happens to children and dependants? You may be a Spartan defender, but…. Maybe private fire refuges should be compulsory in fire-prone areas (currently $3000-5000, small beer cf. the $20,000 extra cost caused by changes in building regs. Changes that will probably make little difference in a severe fire).
Most of this is just common sense. Before we can apply it though we have to demolish the tottering tower of linked assumptions which now pass for fire policy. The believers are fervent. They are still in power. They show no sign of changing- on the contrary, Brumby looks petulant. This gives heart to Rees, Esplin, Tolhurst et al, as they cling to their discredited ideas amid the wreckage.
I hope everyone reading the numerous Crikey bushfire articles by quite a few writers realises that there isnt any actual debate happening anywhere else in the media on wildfire. Sure, lots of early reportage, barking-mad once-off commentators like Greer, Green Armageddonists bent double over their coffee with anxiety about global warming, urban right-wing commentariat thugs yearning for soft Green skulls to crush…but it lasted barely a month. Since then, silence. Broken briefly now by the Royal Commission kerfuffle.
So, John Hartigan, those vast, professional, sophisticated, in-depth resources at your command- what have they contributed to this debate?
Michael: Last point first- managerialism, bureaucracy. This is the reeking miasma which percolates through everything, but no one is rude enough to mention. The fatal fart. People would rather die than open the window. I’ll be writing an article shortly about my near-death experience in a dingy Melbourne hotel room- a “forum” with three Vic. govt bureaucrats. The 20 people who attended were all rendered catatonic after two hours. Doctors despaired. Not a single question got a straight answer. I’d boasted beforehand that I was gunna kick arse in there: I never even saw an arse, being reduced to a snivelling, bewildered amorphous mass by professional obfuscators.
I had sympathy for that rugby player found naked and disoriented in a hotel corridor, defecating…
The 4 corners program last night was a classic case study of the bureaucratic mentality: an eye-glazing subject, one would think: the WA ambulance service. Check out the transcript: people died, ambulances weren’t sent. Simple solution often put but never implemented. The two suits were not politicians, they were transparently sincere. Nothing they said made sense- they never answered a single question intelligibly and could not understand what all the fuss was about. Sound familiar?
Until we re-invent the exercise of authority, we’ll stay in deep shit. Tomorrow’s to-do list.
Next: preparation/fire-proofing. yes, it is insane, the summer dance of the naked domestic firefighters. I’ve tried to deal with that above. But “fire-proofing” is exactly the sort of assumption which got us into strife on Black Sat: severe fire, wind-driven, will overwhelm the bets defences. Lots of evidence from the RC about bare paddocks overrun, well-defended houses burned in a few minutes. Many of the dead were “well-prepared”. Many weren’t. the heat and speed of the fires is just beyond imagination, which is why education has to change right now. Radiant heat can kill at over 100m. Nothing can stop an ember blizzard. CFA firefighters (and DSE) are not allowed to fight raging fire fronts. They can’t anyway, in Black Sat. conditions. they’d die, which is why they are not allowed to. If they can’t, neither can residents. If you choose to stay, fine, but have a bolt-hole ready.
That’s what the CFA says: stay indoors til the “firefront passes”. OK in average fire, deadly in severe fire. Often there is no “fire front’. It comes from all sides. Generates its own winds. And is may last for hours, depending on what’s around you.
Keith: Canberra 2003. There were two reports into that fires- an inquiry then the coroner’s report. Much controversy. The fire was mismanaged for days. But I agree, stringing up individuals just deflects from analysis. If the pine plantations hadn’t been there, things would have been much less dramatic. I remember those plantations decades ago, and thought then what a crazy idea it was. Pinus Radiata is deadly, esp. in plantations close to towns. in my submission to the RC I bang on about this obsessively. Likewise bluegums. I’ve got them on three sides. Nowe the Vic govt is about to allow plantations to be put anywhere “as of right”. Even right-wing Green-hating timber towns have protested, to no avail. In sum, the problem is integrated land management: it doesn’t exist.
Hi Frank,
Great article overall. But I have to take issue with this bit:
The road out of Marysville is flanked by trees on both sides. Five minutes after the convoy went through one of them came down across the road. Five minutes earlier and it could have hit the convoy, and certainly would have forced it to turn around - a second tree down (which happened) and everyone would have been trapped - the potential death toll doesn’t bear thinking about.
With hindsight, and on balance, evacuating the town was probably a mistake. I don’t want to be too critical of the police. It was a split second decision made without the benefit of enough information. The alternative - sheltering at Gallipoli park - was unpleasant but it was probably safer.
Ben: I’d have to go back into the files and check but I think there were two police actions in Marysville (i) police drove around warning people to get out as the fire bore down and (ii) police took a convoy out of town from Gallipoli Park.
It was a tough call, to stay in the park or head north on a risky road. I spent a few hours in Marysville some weeks ago, photographing. Marysville is in a bowl, with Steavenson River at the bottom. The intensity of the fire around the creek and around the park seemed less than in much of the town. Fences untouched for example. Most of the time the safest place to be in these events is the lowest point: the fire might go straight over the top. Depends on many factors but a maximum distance of say 50m from the fire(which is the best that Gallipoli Park can offer) isn’t a lot. Apart from cars on the oval there wasn’t much radiant heat protection. So in hindsight the park was the best option. Better than the road. But on the day it would have been anyone’s guess.
As a rule of thumb you need to be 4 x flame height away from the fire to survive radiant heat. 40m flames were common on the day. Also depends on the wind. While I was there I wondered what I would have done. Given the severe spotting of the fires I’d probably have stayed in the park.
Hi Frank, No need to check your files, that sounds about right. I hope I would have gone to the park - I rather suspect I would have done the wrong thing and tried to fight the fire.
The real lesson should be, I think, that there should have been more information available. My in-laws were with us in Sydney when it hit, and with all the access to the internet and everything else, we couldn’t get any real idea of what was happening until the next day. The CFA site was worse than useless; it only mentioned a few fires in the area, and it was quite clear that they were all nothing to worry about.
The information needed to make an informed decision, just was not available.