Lessons from the Ashes
The devastating southeastern Australia bushfires in the state of Victoria on Feb. 7, 2009, resulted in the loss of 173 lives and caused major property and asset damage. The fires are considered to be Australia's worst peacetime disaster. The questions and issues that quickly emerged will be the subject of major debate, in Australia and internationally, for years to come.
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In the rush to understand why and determine what can be done, an understandably emotive community discussion has run parallel to the legal formalities of a Royal Commission — an independent inquiry into the fires that has been established by the Victorian state government. In developing directions for the future, decisions must be based on solid evidence of what happened and why. To do this thoroughly, many in Australian fire and land management believed that a major research effort was required to establish an authoritative and independent set of data for use by the international fire community.
On Monday morning, Feb. 9, less than 48 hours after the devastating bushfires, representatives of the fire and land management agencies in Victoria gathered in Melbourne at the office of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, Australia's national bushfire research coordinating body, for a telephone hook-up with colleagues around the nation regarding the research data that could be collected to improve bushfire knowledge.
That night the Bushfire CRC was provided with the authority to establish a research task force. Its goal was ambitious but vital — the biggest data collection and analysis program ever undertaken in the aftermath of a bushfire disaster in Australia, and quite probably anywhere.
By Thursday, Feb. 12, with some fires still burning, Victorian agencies still heavily committed to the control effort and many areas still off-limits even to residents, the task force's 30-some participants from around Australia and New Zealand — with the backing of the Victorian State Coroner — set foot in the small township of Wandong in central Victoria, where the first of many lives were lost and houses burned on Feb. 7.
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Almost every day over the next two and half months, the Bushfire CRC placed teams of up to 50 researchers from across Australia, New Zealand and the United States in the field. This amounted to more than 2,000 staff days of extensive data collection and analysis, working in the aftermath of the disaster alongside firefighters, police officers, community workers and residents across the fire-affected areas. In the end the task force analyzed more than 1,300 affected homes, interviewed more than 600 residents and took more than 21,000 photographs.
The USDA Forest Service was represented by Sarah McCaffrey, a research social scientist who helped to define the research program for the task force and visited many of the fire-affected areas. As a result of her cross-Pacific expertise on fire-prone communities, McCaffrey subsequently was invited to provide evidence in June to the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission and in September at the annual conference of the Bushfire CRC and the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council.
The buildings investigation research team included William "Ruddy" Mell and Alex Maranghides from the Building and Fire Research Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. Their knowledge of the procedures followed by the U.S. Burned Area Emergency Response teams added value to the manner in which the Bushfire CRC research teams functioned.
The task force submitted an interim report to the Victorian agencies and subsequently to the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission in June. This report of around 700 pages outlines the data collected across various areas that were burned and draws some preliminary conclusions and findings. There is now an enormous repository of valuable data that can be fully analyzed by Australian and international fire researchers. The task force's legacy will help refocus and reshape bushfire management, community engagement and related policies — particularly in the interface zone — across Australia and perhaps beyond.
The imperative for the Bushfire CRC research task force was to collect time-critical data that would rapidly degrade with weather, site clearance or other types of interference. The data address a range of questions relating to fire behavior; human behavior; and house survival, damage or destruction.
In broad terms, the research focused on fire behavior observations across the major Victorian fires on Feb. 7, a day that saw extremely strong winds as Melbourne reached record-high temperature in the upper-40s Celsius (above 110° F) and single-digit humidity following 12 years of drought. The research also considered the human behavioral factors that affected the pattern of properties or lives lost or saved during these fires, the building and land-use planning factors in select areas that contributed to such losses, and how these factors worked collectively to affect the pattern of losses.
All aspects of the work considered the question: Was the impact of the fires of Feb. 7, 2009, consistent with established knowledge, or was this a result of previously unidentified behaviors or factors? Some of the preliminary findings related to specific fires, others were more general across all the fires. The 1939 Black Friday Victorian fires provided the closest set of weather and fuel conditions for comparison. Those fires burned almost 2 million hectares with the loss of 71 lives.
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