Safety lessons from 2009

A ground-breaking CRC report on what people did during the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria has been acknowledged for its impact on current community safety messages during emergencies.

The report combined an examination of the 173 deaths in the fires with 611 interviews with survivors to produce an in-depth analysis on human behaviour before, during and after the fires.

Doug Hart of Victoria Police was relocted to the offices of the Bushfire CRC shortly after the fires to write the report, initially as a coronial brief. He drew on the work of the police under the Phoenix Taskforce plus the Bushfire CRC Research Taskforce, which looked at the human behaviour, fire and weather behaviour and structural impacts of the fires. An edited version, Lessons Learnt from the Black Saturday Bushfires, was later distributed to all directors of community safety at Australian fire, land and emergency service agencies so that the insights could inform agency and national policy and guidelines.

The outcome of this process was the further publication in late 2016 by AFAC of Community Safety Messaging for Catastrophic Bushfires: Lessons learnt from Black Saturday Bushfires, Victoria 2009, which distills the key points of the report into readily usable statements and guidelines for community safety managers around Australia.

Doug Hart was formally acknowledged for his work this week by the AFAC Community Safety Group chair Andrew Stark.