Disaster database developed

The Inquiries and Reviews Database is an outcome of research commissioned by the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC through the Tactical Research Fund (TRF). Launched last month, the database is a major output from an evaluation study into disaster inquiries and recommendations across Australia.

Disaster inquiries are often undertaken after a major event to identify causes and to take learnings to improve practices. The TRF study, led by Martijn Gough from AITHER, compared recommendations between inquiries. He found a significant number of parallel recommendations as well as many recommendations that are not matched, with broader relevance across jurisdictions. To make the comparison, recommendations were categorised into themes and then converted into a user-friendly database. This open source database can be found here.

With more than 300 inquiries and reviews into natural hazard events since 1884, users can freely search and filter inquiries and reviews by year, keywords and type. Users can also isolate individual recommendations or compare recommendations against different inquires and themes. All information can be sliced and diced further by downloading a CSV file.  Currently, there are recommendations from 55 inquires and reviews between 2008-2017 with a total of 1336 recommendations.  The CRC intends to update the tool with all recommendations since 1884 plus with new inquiries as they occur.

If you are aware of an inquiry or review of recent times that is not listed in our tool, please get in touch with me.