Article

Liberal Party MLA Jacqui Burke invited me to give a presentation in Canberra on Wednesday night (13 September) about Firestorm: Trial by Fire.

About 20 to 30 people went to the meeting, and I delivered my talk.

Peter's presentation:

Jacqui Burke
Weston Creek
September 2006
Words struggle to explain the sheer astonishment of fire-fighters as the suburbs erupted around them. Power failed to 50 000 homes and gas mains opened up like blowtorches.
Convection currents between two merging fire fronts created a series of vortexes — one measured 150m across and was moving at more than one hundreds kilometres an hour.
The tornado crashed through
15 km of eucalypt and pine forests, cutting a swathe through trees
and steel fence pickets before it surged across the final stretch
of open ground to explode into Chapman in Weston Creek.
Eighty-nine farm homesteads were lost and 418 suburban homes. Five thousand people were evacuated to recovery centres.
But there was no advance warning, no preparations were made to cut firebreaks or to spray water into the pine forests to lessen the fire’s
intensity and power. Many homes swallowed by squalls of flaming embers.
On January 18 the fires had burned for ten days in the national parks around the ACT. It was extreme fire danger weather, yet it was as if the conflagration had appeared from nowhere at the city’s edge.
The firestorm that struck Canberra on Saturday 18 January 2003 tested the ACT administration to its limits and beyond.
The facts show that this was more than nature running wild. It was a failure to be prepared and a failure to understand how and why it happened.
But more than any other thing the disaster has also tested Canberra’s political structure to its limits, and found it wanting.
This event was to become a political failure as well as a human tragedy. We are still waiting for the findings of an independent coronial inquiry.
We all remember January 18.
It was in the weeks after the fires that I felt I could try to tell this story. I wanted to tell Canberra’s story at the point of impact, to give Australians an account of the national capital’s worst natural disaster. It seemed to be the first time Canberra was a single community, sharing a common disaster and helping one another.
I wanted to show how firefighters and police fought a courageous rearguard and how individual people faced their own moments of truth.
However, ACT officials were told to say nothing. To assemble an account of the fires I spoke to firefighters and police, to people I had spent many years getting to know.
The extent of the disaster was there for all to see.
A drive through Weston and other outlying suburbs in the days and weeks after the fire left a scene of destruction that was difficult to comprehend.
I recall a sense of horror when, on driving to the Cotter on Monday, I found still smouldering carcasses of two horses lying in a paddock - they had died a terrible death.
But we can only imagine the terrors for the victims who lost their lives, Alison Tener (38), Peter Brooke (73), Douglas Fraser (60) and Dorothy McGrath (83). Many suffered severe burns.
Almost 500 homes were destroyed and there was a catastrophic destruction of city services. Still today, there is no official word to acknowledge that this was not just a natural disaster.
It was a disaster that went wrong. The fires were badly handled. Mistakes were made. Equipment failed.
So what went so wrong? Was it – as senior officials claimed – an unstoppable act of God?
But think about this.
Canberra has nine fire stations and each one has a pumper, two of them designed for heavy rescue work. There was one in reserve without fittings.
As the wind borne embers descended on Canberra’s south, five of these pumpers were knocked out leaving their crews facing a horrible death.
Howe could this happen?
Fire crews had tried for five years to have a air filters placed in the air intake valves on the trucks. This would prevent burning embers from being sucked into the plastic and paper manifolds. Five precious ACT pumpers were put out of action almost immediately by a fault that would have cost $200 to repair.
At least one fire crew I know of was forced to run for their lives, and they were overtaken by the fire front.
Radio communication had been faulty for years and there were large black spots. Most fire crews, police and emergency workers had little idea what was happening and they unable to reach base for instructions.
The radios only had capacity for two operators, who were quickly overwhelmed once the fire embers broke into urban areas. This failure of communications meant that any fire larger than a grass fire would overwhelm the system, and predictably, it did.
No special arrangements were made with NSW fire services despite several large fires burning in ACT and NSW national parks near Canberra for a week,
There is the now unresolved question about the McIntyre’s hut fire, and whether NSW deliberately allowed the fire to burn. Many have told of being refused access to fight the fires. The NSW Rural Fire Service has worked furiously behind the scenes to avoid any criticism.
Then there is the other question about using air delivered incendiary devices across a very large area of unburned land in a last minute effort to turn the fire.
Many say this was doomed to failure, and actually served to join up the fires.
In Canberra, managers informed fire crews and emergency workers on Thursday 16 January - as were politicians – that the fire was expected to hit Canberra that weekend.
No special plans were put in place. Police did not even call up off duty officers – because they weren’t told. The communications sergeant on the morning of the fire, on his own initiative, sent out police patrol cars to begin clearing rural townships. This alone saved many lives.
No plans were made to rotate fire fighting staff once the fires moved into the urban area, and in fact at the end of the worst day on record, ACT Emergency Services refused to call any off duty staff into service.
The reason? Because it would not leave reserve staff for the mop-up, a comment made to me by the then head of ACT Emergency Services.
Fire stations across Canberra were not placed on alert. No warnings were issued. The first crews from Fyshwick and Belconnen were sent to a house fire in Weston, and not one crew or fire station knew ahead of time that hundreds of homes were already in flames.
Crews told me they drove to addresses expecting a house fire to find entire streets ablaze.
The traditional strategy, proven and used for almost every house fire I have ever seen, was abandoned.
The established and mandatory procedure is for a District Officer to established a base of operations, a field operation centre- to coordinate crews, manage breathing equipment, arrange refreshments, hold crews in reserve, manage medical assistance, and deal with the threat.
This did not happen. Instead the District Officer – who had not worked in fire operations for a number of years – drove around picking people up from the side of the road. No doubt this assisted individuals, but it abandoned procedural necessity.
Crews were left abandoned to go house to house, dragging hoses and without breathing equipment, water, food, medical care or support of any kind. The crews whose pumpers did not catch fire, had no radio communications.
NSW fire crews lined up with a fleet of rural pumpers ready to help and they were instructed to go home.
ACT Emergency Services refused to make any public statement until the fires were actually already setting homes alight – and this was the day after Tharwa had been saved by a hairs breath – and where several outlying properties had been overrun and destroyed.
When I called the emergency services media officer later in the afternoon her  teary reply was “We are not doing media today”.
Some years ago I was among the journalists invited to the opening of the new Disaster Centre at the AFP’s Winchester Centre in Belconnen. This centre was designed as a headquarters for any eventuality.
Instead, knowing the fire was heading towards Canberra, Emergency Services and ACT officials crammed into the tiny and unsuitable former Curtin school building.
What thinking allowed this to be the permanent centre for emergency operations anyway. It was purpose designed as a school.
Yet a multi-service police, fire and emergency services centre had been built in Gungahlin, a centre that was years ahead of its time, and when policing was carried out for years from Belconnen.
There were many other incomprehensible decisions and actions. It was astonishing that the head of the mostly volunteer Bush fire Service, Peter Lucas Smith, was appointed to lead the emergency once a disaster was declared.
The protocols called for the AFP to lead any disaster. Instead, the AFP was left out. The petty minded ACT bureaucracy was behind this poor thinking.
Lucas Smith had limited urban fire and rescue experience, since his speciality was rural fire control, and he already had been fighting fires for two weeks and must have been exhausted.

Bureaucrats from Environment ACT crammed into the tiny Curtin station, clearly worried about their own role in this disaster.
This ideologically-based organisation is dedicated to conservation and ecology and was behind efforts to get rid of the ACT Bush Fire Council, its undeclared enemy. Environment ACT had jealously prevented any measures to reduce the massive over growth of fuel that lay as a clear threat to Canberra’s flanks for years.
How did this happen? The ACT was given self-government in 1989 and local political part-timers and non-politicians were swept up into a new Legislative Assembly.
These politicians have never really come to terms with the city’s hard nosed bureaucrats and how they operate almost entirely in their own self interest.
Over some 14 years, I have sought to place for public debate the malefactions of successive city bureaucrats. In large part, these highly paid men and women have exploited well meaning politicians to defend them, to give them pay rises and choice appointments, to turn a blind eye to their mistakes and to carry out their flawed business ventures.
In this respect, Canberra has paid a very heavy toll. Has there been an honest search for the truth about what happened?
Make your own judgment.
A coronial inquiry was mandatory for the fire and because of the four deaths and loss of property. This inquiry was for many victims a way of getting at the truth, and having answers.
Today, more than three years later, the inquiry is still unfinished and many crucial elements have been stifled by Government solicitors. The Attorney General Jon Stanhope, nine public servants and a costly team of lawyers have carried on their own personal crusade to derail the inquiry, certainly to stifle it.
But this was never about blame. It was about a search for the truth and about being held accountable. Poor decisions and poor preparation meant this was a disaster waiting to happen. It was inevitable.
Having a band of highly flammable pine plantations ringing Canberra and attached to the worst levels of bush overgrowth surely is a sign. The several large fires coming from Brindabella over the decades must be a clear warning.
CSIRO research scientist Phil Cheney predicted a fire conflagration event covering 60,000 ha that could cause widespread damage in a single day to the suburbs adjoining forests and parks. ‘Under this scenario firefighting resources would be totally overwhelmed,’ He said.
His warning was brushed aside in the rush to undermine the independence of the vital fire and emergency services agencies.
In 1994, an independent report into bushfire management, Fire
Hazard Reduction Practices of the ACT Government, was carried out by a
former South Australian Country Fire Authority chief, Howard McBeth,
warning that the ACT contained the highest levels of bushland fuel of any city in the country. The report was commissioned by Environment ACT and the Parks and Conservation Service, but they rejected McBeth’s findings, accusing him of straying outside his brief.
The Labor Government of the day refused to pay him.
The report said serious work was needed to reduce the fuel loads.
The report identified specific problem areas where badly-prepared
houses abutted pine forests and where there was poor access and inadequate
fuel-reduction zones. McBeth warned that if existing procedures
for fire prevention continued it was ‘inevitable that significant loss of
assets will accrue, together with loss of life, during the next single or
multiple or conflagration fire event. The urban–rural interface will
obviously bear the brunt of such loss.’
His predictions came to a tragic
denouement on January 18 when the conditions he warned against
played a part in causing the biggest disaster in Canberra’s history.
‘Culturally, socially, politically and diplomatically, the ACT community
has been lulled into a false sense of security with regard to the ravages
of bushfire.’
McBeth said the money the government owed him was the least of
his concerns. He had seen too many firefighters lose their lives and he
had seen adults and even children burned. ‘I don’t want to have to
appear in a Coroner’s Court in the ACT in the next year or so and say,
“Well, I told them so”.’
What about the Government establishing its own inquiry into the operational response by Ron McLeod in August 2003?
Three years on and his major recommendation – i.e. creating a Fire and Emergency Services Authority – has been discarded.
Tharwa fire captain Val Jefferys said the fire management was a fiasco for the first whole week. “I knew in the
first week that if we didn’t get it under control before it got out of the
hills, we would never get it under control. Stockyard Spur fire, Gingera
and McIntyre’s Hut were all ‘drivable fires’.
‘It was a complete fiasco. I have been trying to come to grips to why
anybody would let that fire burn. I can’t see any justification for it. In
the middle of the worst drought and highest fuel loads we have ever
had. You just have to hit it hard. There were eight fires in Tharwa. We
were all sitting here waiting to be called. Nobody called. We couldn’t
believe it, on the day it started. The crux of the whole thing is as far as I
am concerned the fire should not have got away. I reckon they should
have pushed the pine trees back 500m with the big Army dozers. Why
the fire was so intense was the monstrous fuel load in Namadgi, because parks management wouldn’t do any hazard reduction burning.’
Are we any the wiser three years later? Should victims feel the Government has let them down? Have we learned from this disaster?
Will it happen again?
And if the Government and its bureaucrats worked so hard to prevent an open inquiry into the firestorm, what is happening across the rest of the administration.
Is the answer to have an honest and open analysis by an independent media? Do you feel The Canberra Times has let you down?
Has the Rural Press newspaper avoided asking hard questions, after being handed a two years contract to run full page adverts on the Government’s Road to Recovery Campaign? Was this a cynical tactic to silence the newspaper and mislead the public?
Do you think it has worked?

Comments

I attended Peter's talk.  It was very informative and the information accords with much of what I myself have obtained through my own ontacts with fire victims; firefighters; television, radio and print media representatives, local identities such as Val Jeffery and Wayne West: various advocacy groups; and information provided by residents via the citizens' bushfire website www.inquiryprotest.com  This website was set up by Laurie Buchanan following the Government's and senior ESB bureaucrats' attempts to close down the Coronial Inquest headed up by Maria Doogan.

I look forward to the talk being placed on Peter's website and will have it linked to our own.  I recommend that all those with an interest in seeing what really happened, rather than sanitised explanations from the Stanhope Government and some of its senior bureaucrats and supporters, read both the book and follow up talks.  The only way we are going to be properly prepared for future disasters is to learn from the mistakes of the past.  The Government's attempts to hide these mistakes from public view shows a complete disregard for the community and an arrogance that is difficult to believe.

Ric Hingee

Victims advocate and co-convenor of www.inquiryprotest.com