Enquiry into bushfires is underway

[Kingswood]

The Enquiry into the Black Saturday bushfires is underway.

Some links:
Ash Wednesday warnings convinced me to leave: witness
No warnings for Strathewen, commission hears

I think a big problem with the fires was the inability to communicate to the public the severity of the fire conditions on the day in a simple and concise manner. There were only meaningless words like extreme. Trouble is, "extreme" can mean weather conditions that rate maybe 50, or 300 as Black Saturday did.

I think we would be better served if we had a simple numerical system, similar to that which is used in the USA to rate tornadoes, and used in the USA and Australia to rate hurricanes and cyclones. People would then know that Category 5 Fire Weather is "extreme". If the scale was open-ended, hearing about "Category 30" fire weather would REALLY communicate the severity.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I'm wondering if the media over there are like the media here in that they make such a big deal out of every little thing, people have become jaded to their hype? Like the "Boy That Cried Wolf", they've lost credibility?

[ZenGum]

Certainly, the media have the same rabid slavering hyper-reaction to just about anything that will grab the attention of some channel-surfing Joe-Average.... "SHOCKING REVELATIONS ABOUT UNDERAGE DRINING IN OUR EXCLUSIVE EXPOSE!!!! THE STORY NO PARENT CAN AFFORD TO MISS!!!"

Serious issues that require thought and self-examination are damn near taboo, except for on the (government funded) ABC.

However, this issue is a serious one and there were, it seems, some serious failures of communication. One town - I can't remember which one, I think it was Kinglake - was a bad case. The command center knew that a wind change was coming, and that the wind would drive the fire straight over the town on a huge front that would be impossible to defend, and even though this was known more than two hours before it happened, no warning was issued to that town. IMHO, that is a serious #@&%-up. This is the sort of thing this inquiry is looking at.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Here, we have a system that causes the TV to make a klaxon sound and the warning scrolls across the bottom of the screen, on all channels, for severe weather warnings.

I'm not sure if they can use it for other serious situations, but either way, somebody has to make the decision to use it and you have to have your TV on too.

[Griff]

Radio as well. Our schools have emergency auto-dial phone messages, it seems like people could put themselves on a list based on geography.

[ZenGum]

What is this "television" you speak of?

Srsly yes we have all that, over-ride messages on TV and radio, and, for the last year or two, we have had the logistics in place to send warning SMSs to all phones, but it was stalled because different levels of government were arguing about who would have to pay for it.
IMHO this wouldn't have helped on the day - the problem was that in some cases specific warnings were not issued when they might have been, not that they didn't get through.

[Bullitt]

The Incident Command System here in the US seems to work well for our wildfires: http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/IS/I...urce/index.htm. For the PDF file adverse, here's a decent summary of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_Command_System.

Don't know if you all have something like that, but my fire academy instructors and guys I worked with on a fire in California last year like the system. It's basically meant to alleviate the problems of different government agencies working together and with the local population, which seems to be the case here. Yes I know it's directed by the infamous FEMA, but the testing/certification process I went through, depth and thoroughness of preparatory materials, and actions on the ground I witnessed make it appear to be an effective tool for complicated incidents like wildfires here in the US.