Newsletter 2 - fatalities and building losses

This is the second newsletter for 2014 from the Fatalities and Building Losses project, with updates for the project end-users and associates.

Welcome and thank-you!

Welcome to our second quarterly newsletter and especially to those end-users who have joined us since our first newsletter.  Thank-you to all those who have participated and provided feedback over the past few months - the end-products of this project will now be that much closer to what you want.  Thank you additionally for helping us obtain more data on injuries, rescues and near misses.  We couldn’t do this without you!  It was also great catching up with some of you at the AFAC/ BNHCRC 2014 conference in Wellington.

Project objectives

For the hazards floods, cyclones, earthquakes, heatwaves, severe storms and bushfires:

• an analysis of fatalities, in terms of demographics, social and environmental circumstances surrounding deaths
• an analysis of people otherwise affected by natural hazards – injured, near-misses, rescued and
• an analysis of building damage and losses arising from natural hazard events over the last century.

Major outcomes

• a longitudinal and geographical examination of trends in the exposure and vulnerability of people and buildings
• an understanding of the impact of changes to policy and procedures on life and property loss
• an interpretation of trends in exposure and vulnerability in the context of emerging issues (e.g. ageing population, population shifts, climate change), in order to determine potential future trends
• development of hazard specific risk communication from the analysis of fatalities and injuries and
• evidence-based data to assist with appropriate emergency management and government decision making.

Project deliverables

In addition to the quarterly and annual reports, the team will produce the following:

• 30 March 2014 - Journal article: overview of heatwave fatalities based on current knowledge
• 28 November 2014- Report on data quality and completeness of historical natural hazard building losses
• 31December 2014 - Report on data quality for flood fatalities and the social and environmental circumstances surrounding each fatality
• 29 May 2015 - Report and submission of journal article on flood fatalities alongside a presentation of the results to relevant end-users
• 31 Dec 2015 - Report on data quality for fatalities from tropical cyclone, earthquake, heatwaves and severe storm and the social and environmental circumstances surrounding each fatality
• 31 May 2016 - Workshop with end-users and stakeholders to discuss fatality and building loss data
• 31 July 2016 - Report and journal article on fatalities from tropical cyclone, earthquake, heatwaves, bushfire and severe storm in Australia
• 31 Dec 2016- Report and journal article of a detailed analysis of all historical natural hazard building losses (by state and time period), alongside a seminar
• 30 Mar 2017 - Report on the analysis of injury, near-miss and rescue data
• 15 June 2017 - A report on the impact of changes to policy and procedures related to natural hazard risk

Project End Users

The following people have agreed to be end-user representatives for the project. If we have missed anyone, please let us know. The good news: we now have some end-users from Queensland! The sad news: we have farewelled Simon Opper, NSW SES, our Lead End-User, as he spends a year focusing on home renovations. 

• Christopher Lee (Office of Environment & Heritage, NSW)
• Elliott Simons (NSW State Emergency Service)
• Bob Stevenson (SA State Emergency Service)
• Melissa O’Halloran (NSW Rural Fire Service)
• Michael Morgan/ Michael Shepherd (SA Metropolitan Fire Service)
• Damien Killalea (Tasmania Fire Service)
• Jennifer Pidgeon/ Allen Gale (WA Dept of Fire & Emergency Service)
• Ed Pikusa (SAFECOM)
• John Richardson (Red Cross)
• Robert Preston/ Graham Wiltshire (Qld Public Safety Business Agency)
• Rowena Richardson (Qld Inspector General Emergency Management)
• Mark Drew (Qld Reconstruction Authority)
• Linda Anderson-Berry (Bureau of Meteorology)
• Sarah Lewis (ANZEMC Recovery Group)

Progress update

• Ethics application completed, amended and accepted by Macquarie University ethics committee.
• Visits to the Victorian and the SA state archives offices to further improve the collection of flood fatalities.
• Detailed ongoing work to improve the collection of named fatalities and data on building damage held within PerilAUS for all hazards (major events), with a current focus on floods.  For floods we have commenced adding injury, rescue and near miss data.
• A paper providing a general overview of heatwave fatalities based on the current data within PerilAUS (1844-2010) was published online by Environmental Science and Policy in July and will be available in hardcopy in October.  [See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901114000999]
• Investigations have commenced into obtaining, from AIHW, all-state hospital admissions data on morbidity from floods and other natural hazards.
• Assistance requested & underway from end-users in obtaining injury, rescue and near miss data from their organisations and/ or other relevant emergency management groups.
• Commenced collection of further environmental data, from BoM, on flood events that have resulted in fatalities.
• On 8 August Rob presented initial results on property losses and fatalities from natural hazards (especially bushfires) to fire professionals at the BNHCRC Hobart Research Briefing.
• Rob and Lucinda gave oral and/ or poster presentations at the AFAC/ BNHCRC 2‑4 September 2014 conference (see below for details) on work completed to date.  Rob and Lucinda submitted a paper entitled, Estimating the impacts of natural hazards on fatalities and building losses for possible inclusion in the conference proceedings.

AFAC and BNHCRC conference: After disaster strikes: Learning from adversity

Three staff and two students from Risk Frontiers attended the recent AFAC/ BNHCRC conference in Wellington, New Zealand, with the assistance of the BNHCRC, in order to share findings and mingle with emergency management professionals. 

Robin Van den Honert gave an oral presentation for our project, on Estimating the impacts of natural hazards on property and building losses.  This was a first pass at some of our work to date but also building on previous Risk Frontiers’ work on normalisation of loss data.  Lucinda Coates presented a poster on the heatwaves paper recently published as one of our first outputs: The heat is on… and has been for a while, new research shows.  For those interested, here is a link to an ABC interview on some aspects of that paper: http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2014/09/04/4081144.htm

Felipe Dimer de Oliveira, who is co-project leader for the other project within the Scenarios and loss analysis cluster (Using realistic disaster scenario analysis to understand natural hazard impacts and emergency management requirements), gave a thought-provoking presentation on How safe is safe enough, as part of a panel on emergency management policy. 

Two of our PhD students supported by BNHCRC gave presentations on their work.  Avianto Amri’s poster was A cross cultural investigation of child-centred disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation in Indonesia and Australia.  Emma Phillips gave both an oral and a poster presentation on Disruption of critical infrastructure during prolonged natural disasters.  A brief interview of her experiences at the conference is given below.

Roving reporter

This month our roving reporter caught up with Emma Phillips, one of our BNHCRC PhD students, who attended the recent AFAC/ BNHCRC Conference in Wellington, New Zealand.

Emma has embarked upon an ambitious project to qualify and quantify the impacts of prolonged and multi-hazard natural hazard events on infrastructure and to understand the interconnectedness of these critical services.  Recent events such as the 2009 southeast Australia heatwave and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan have highlighted the vulnerability of infrastructure to disruption from natural hazards.  Prolonged and multi- natural hazard events can cause vast and on-going disruption to infrastructure that is vitally important for day to day living, the economy and emergency response.  There is a lack of comprehensive modelling to investigate long term disruption to lifeline networks from such events.  While various network vulnerability models have been developed, most were not created specifically to look at shocks from natural disasters, and certainly not prolonged or multi-hazard events.  The total cost of long-duration natural hazard events is often much higher than the value of damage to the infrastructure itself.  There is a growing reliance on infrastructure and technology, some of which is often closely coupled and with strong interdependencies, which can cause a potential cascade of failure.  Therefore, it has never been more important to understand network vulnerabilities and to analyse the cost of long term disruptions, both social and economic.

RR: Emma, what did you value most about the conference?

EP: It was the amount of people coming up and asking about my work, with words of advice, and being willing to share their time and data.

RR: How did this conference stand out from others you’ve attended?

EP: That willingness to share and collaborate... comments after I presented were not so much that I felt the need to justify my work but, rather, showed a keen interest.  People weren't possessive of their own work, but were happy to contribute ideas. All industry, not just project, end-users were there to listen; they had their own ideas and thoughts for future work and directions.

RR: What do you hope to have achieved by the 2015 conference?

EP: Some specific outcomes are a review of past Australasian disasters and their impact on lifeline networks. This will help define lifeline vulnerabilities, catalogue disruption, cost and time taken to rebuild/reconnect.  I will also undertake a review of current modelling techniques to determine the vulnerability of networks and visualise network response to shocks.  By 2015 my hope is that these reviews have helped us better understand network vulnerabilities, behaviour and interconnectedness and, with a defined modelling approach, that we have started to apply this to defined potential future hazard events.

RR: How might the BNHCRC extended network of members best assist in that?

EP: I would like to see more representatives from key utility, transport and communication groups – maybe even some people from national security – attend the Adelaide conference in 2015.

RR: Finally, Emma, do you have any suggestions for the Adelaide conference organisers?

EP: To be honest, the past two years’ conferences have been great and I only wish the Adelaide conference luck – I am really looking forward to attending. The only thing I would suggest is to listen to the learnings of this year’s conference in Wellington and carry those through to the industry, maintain dialogue and continue to improve.

Things we would like from you!

• Injury & Rescue data: We are in the process of contacting and/ or visiting end-users for assistance in collecting any information (reports, databases or documentation) held by emergency management organisation in regards to injuries, rescues and other near misses and fatalities resulting from flood and other natural hazard impacts/ call-outs. If you have not yet contacted Lucinda about this, OR if you have any physical and environmental details of flood events that have led to a fatality [a list of such events will soon be distributed], please drop her a line. The more data we can gather, the better our final results!
• Teleconferences: How regularly would you like us to hold these to keep us all connected and up-to-date?  Once every couple of months?  More often?  Less often?  Let us know!
• Items for the next newsletter: any meetings, conferences, news stories, gossip etc you would like to share, please send them to Lucinda. Editor’s deadline: Tuesday 9 December 2014!

Researchers’ contact details

Finally, please contact us if you have any questions, suggestions or feedback on the project:

Please note: Katharine is on maternity leave until March 2015. In her absence Lucinda Coates will be managing the fatality, injury and rescue component of the project.

·         Lucinda Coates - lucinda.coates@mq.edu.au

·         Rob van den Honert - rob.vandenhonert@mq.edu.au

·         Deanne Bird - deanne.bird@gmail.com

·         Ryan Crompton - ryan.crompton@mq.edu.au