Bush Fire Risk, Due Diligence & Mitigation Controls

In this episode of Risk! Engineers Talk Governance, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis discuss due diligence for bushfires.

Richard has been involved in advising on bushfire risk and controls since Ash Wednesday in 1984, while both Richard and Gaye as R2A were involved with bushfire assessments post Black Saturday in 2009.  

Their discussion highlights:

• Bushfire season is getting longer, and the ability to prepare for it is getting shorter. Volunteer firefighters are also declining.
• Bushfire best practice for local planning for protection has adopted a vulnerability approach – criticality rather than likelihood.
• From a due diligence viewpoint, we know we cannot stop bushfires. But, what are all the controls that we can put in place?  
• Often it's not the threat of the bushfire itself, but the interaction of a community or people with the bushfire – the vulnerability of peri-urban areas.
• Building codes have been updated to improve bushfire resistance, but challenges remain around prescribed burning and access of remote areas during fires.
• Prepare your property, but be ready to evacuate early on high-risk days, as access can quickly become blocked.

For further information on Richard and Gaye’s consulting work with R2A, head to https://www.r2a.com.au.

Transcript

Megan (Producer) (00:00):

Welcome to Risk! Engineers Talk Governance. In this episode, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis discuss due diligence for bushfires. We hope you enjoy their chat. If you do, please give us a rating and subscribe on your favourite podcast platform. If you'd like more information on R2A's work or have any feedback or topic ideas, please head to the website www.r2a.com.au.

Gaye Francis (00:30):

Hi Richard, welcome to another podcast session.

Richard Robinson (00:32):

Good morning, Gaye.

Gaye Francis (00:34):

Today what we thought we'd talk about is bushfire risk, and we're getting into the hot part of the year (in Australia) and bushfire season is fast approaching. Although speaking to CFA (Country Fire Association) number of years ago, they're saying that the bushfire season seems to be getting longer and longer, and the ability to prepare for such bushfire seasons is getting shorter timewise.

Richard Robinson (01:00):

And also some of the CFA chaps I've talked to, getting volunteers is not the way it used to be either.

Gaye Francis (01:04):

No, that's very true. People aren't living in their community as much are they? And helping out.

Richard Robinson (01:10):

Well, I was particularly interested as I commented, I was busy down at my daughter and son-in-law's place mowing and slashing on the weekend because they live in the bush in Gippsland (Victoria) and making sure that their house is clear and all those good things you're supposed to do.

Gaye Francis (01:22):

So helping out.

Richard Robinson (01:24):

Yep.

Gaye Francis (01:25):

What we thought we'd talk about today was the bushfire risk and then the controls that you can put in place to mitigate against those. And I guess our involvement, well, Richard's involvement in particular started very early on after the Ash Wednesday fires in, what'd you say? 83? 1983.

Richard Robinson (01:43):

Thank you. Thank you for reminding me of that.

Gaye Francis (01:44):

And then we've had some other involvement in bushfire assessments over time, particularly the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. And we were part of the Royal Commission, which we've talked about previously in the electrical distribution podcast that we did.

Richard Robinson (02:01):

Well, the thing that was interesting about that. At the time I was working for GHD with my then business partner who was the principal planner or became a business partner, and I was the senior risk engineer. And we'd written a paper after Ash Wednesday, so it presumably would've been in 84, maybe 85, basically summarising a vulnerability approach to bushfire risk management. And we dug it out and I must say my son looked at the papers. Gee, that's an old format. That was a really old paper, isn't it?

Gaye Francis (02:30):

It's almost typeset rather than computer set, Richard. <laughs>

Richard Robinson (02:35):

Well, the picture's sketched by hand, isn't it?

Gaye Francis (02:38):

It is.

Richard Robinson (02:41):

Anyway, but what I found completely fascinating is that we then downloaded some stuff from bushfire, best practice from CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) and local planning for bushfire protection from Environment Land, Water and Planning, and they also have adopted the vulnerability approach, which is the very military intelligence approach, which basically is a criticality driven approach. It doesn't ask the question how likely something is because bushfires are basically generational, but you know that they will happen. It's a bit like the Powerline and Bushfire Safety Taskforce work and the REFCLS (Rapid Earth Fault Current Limiters) or ground fault neutralisers, they've apparently worked very well from what your feedback was. And has stopped, the likelihood of bushfire starts from electrical faults on the network. But that doesn't stop bushfires.

Gaye Francis (03:23):

No, because we know that bushfires have started for a whole lot of reasons, often human related.

Richard Robinson (03:29):

Well, I thought the one always amused me was people driving somewhere to go to Eildon or go down to the Gippsland Lakes or something like that, about an hour and a half out of Melbourne, their bearing on their trailer gets so hot that it burst into flame and then they pull over on the side of the road and the bushfire starts. It is a source of frustration to the CFA. I've had this explained to me several times.

Gaye Francis (03:49):

So I guess from a due diligence viewpoint, we know that bushfire starts. So then what are all the controls that you can put in place? And I think one of the interesting things about this is it's really not the threat of the bushfire itself, it's the interaction of a community or people with the bushfire, isn't it? And I think we talked about it in the planning, urban planning, episode where we talked about major hazards. It's that vulnerability and what do you call it, the peri-urban.

Richard Robinson (04:19):

Where is the bush and the people who interact. And I think I mentioned in the previous episode, if you read Luke's Bushfires in Australia from CSIRO, he sort of points out in the 1930's if you're around Melbourne, it was Sandringham sort of places. And then in the 1980's and 90's it was Gembrook and places like that. And in 2010, it was Marysville and Kinglake and places like that where people have been moving into the bush and there was poor access, poor water, all those sorts of things. But a very nice place to live otherwise.

Gaye Francis (04:51):

I've even noticed on the news and talking about people are going out to live in those places, but they're not necessarily "country people". If you've been involved in a bushfire, you move on, you typically don't rebuild, you move on.

Richard Robinson (05:07):

You move back into the suburbs because you don't do it twice.

Gaye Francis (05:12):

So the people that are living in these areas are often newbies. So I've noticed even on the commercial radio and news and TV at the moment, they're doing a lot of educational pieces around that (e.g.) prepare your house -- like you went down to your daughter's on the weekend and made sure everything was cleared around the house and make sure you've got a plan on those days. How are you going to evacuate? So I thought what we'd do is we just go through, I guess your threatened vulnerability assessment. So you were doing due diligence all the way back in those time.

Richard Robinson (05:43):

Well we didn't call it that!

Gaye Francis (05:46):

But it was the right thing.

Richard Robinson (05:48):

But just making sure that all reasonable practical controls were in place. And I think the one that always jumped out, because it was partly because Kevin was a town planner was that the way the bushfires happened, you get a hot northerly and you get the bushfire coming south, and then when they get the wind change, it goes from west to east. So if you're on the downside of that long skinny fire, you're suddenly at risk. So from the point of view of a township in the bush, you don't want developments to the north or the west and golf courses to the west, where the grass keeps mowed and things like, that just gave you a big fire break. Or potato fields or something that's not there at the height of summer.

Gaye Francis (06:20):

Right. And is that carried through, do you think, to most townships now?

Richard Robinson (06:25):

Oh, that's what, when you read these bushfire risks and best practice guides and all these sorts of things, I think it's pretty much doing it. They're ignoring the likelihood side as you've pointed out, and it's all being driven by the vulnerability on a criticality basis.

Gaye Francis (06:41):

So I guess that's part of the protection. We talked about REFCLS potentially as an ignition source control in relation to powerlines.

Richard Robinson (06:51):

And that's likelihood though.

Gaye Francis (06:53):

I guess the golf courses and stuff is part of the prevention, but a lot of work is being done around mitigations, isn't it? The minimisation of the consequences. And I think after Black Saturday, a lot of the building codes put in place bushfire attack level, and there are requirements to then...

Richard Robinson (07:12):

Building control how the house should be resistant. Like you should have a tin roof, desirably, clear your gutters out, fill them with water if you feel like it, and have a non-combustible structure.

Gaye Francis (07:21):

And I think they were trying to stop the fire getting under the house as well. So you had to have it sort of blocked in so there was no distance. So there's been a lot of work done around those things. Bushfires aren't going to go away with climate change.

Richard Robinson (07:36):

Not it south west Australia.

Gaye Francis (07:36):

With climate change they're saying that they're becoming more likely.

Richard Robinson (07:41):

More intense too. But that's part to do with the fact we haven't been doing enough burning off. I mean, it's one of the complications everyone recognises that you should keep fuel loads down, but the window to do the fuel load burning (is difficult) because the fire season is getting longer, there's less time to do that. And you might recall there's been some instances where it was the burning off that got away that's caused the fire, which was obviously somewhat of an embarrassment. So it's actually got complicated and it's not getting any easier. And as we also commented too, that the number of volunteers for the CFA is probably generally declining, and there's some other issues associated with that that they haven't been thought through.

Gaye Francis (08:17):

So the ability to do some of this planning work that they've relied on to minimise the consequences is getting harder and harder to do.

Richard Robinson (08:24):

Remember the CFA was created as a result of 1939 fires. And one of the consequences of that was that small fires tend to get put out, but it's when the big fire happens, there's not enough firefighters to go around and to stop the small fire from becoming a big fire. So that there's sort of an obvious size. And the way we've been doing it, it's like, I think I commented since they've gone days of total fire ban, there's never not been a black ash or red day that wasn't on a total fire ban day. And the ability to call it now and particularly catastrophic days got really, really good. So talking to my daughter, the plan is on a total fire ban day, the kids and my daughter are probably gone. If it's a catastrophic day, everybody's gone.

Gaye Francis (09:07):

And you've got to go early, because we've talked about that in other cases as well as it's the access to some of these places that is really tricky. And the ability for people to get out if they leave it too late almost disappears.

Richard Robinson (09:21):

You can't, because there's trees down everywhere. I mean, the storms of winter, they've got trees down all over the place and you have to do a U-turn and go around the other way.

Gaye Francis (09:29):

So I guess our advice, if you want to call that, prep your house, but if you are given a warning to leave on a bushfire day, I think that's probably...

Richard Robinson (09:41):

And the way they're doing it now, you will get a message on your phone.

Gaye Francis (09:44):

It's very clever, isn't it? They've done a lot of work around that.

Richard Robinson (09:48):

So yeah, from our point of view, I mean, it was a generation ago, I wrote that paper, and so far as we could tell, most of the things in that paper have been done. It's sort of interesting to say all these things at that time, although at another level it's a little bit frustrating.

Gaye Francis (10:02):

I think the important thing is to make sure that we can continue to talk about these things though, because they don't go away.

Richard Robinson (10:09):

No, exactly.

Gaye Francis (10:10):

As you said, the bushfire only comes up every 25 or 30 years, and unless you've been involved, you don't sort of think that it's going to happen to you. But all of these controls remain robust and remain relevant that I think it's really important to keep talking about them.

Richard Robinson (10:30):

Yep.

Gaye Francis (10:30):

So thank you for joining us today, Richard, and we'll see you next time. Thanks everyone.

Richard Robinson (10:36):

Thanks Gaye.