CFA disliked fire safety staff plan

THE CFA had an “antipathy” towards the idea of fire safety advisers and failed to appoint them to all but two control centres on Black Saturday, the Bushfires Royal Commission heard yesterday.
Fire safety advisers had been recommended by a coroner after five firefighters died at Linton in 1998, but agencies had vehemently opposed the idea then and only paid lip service to it now, said Peter Rozen, counsel assisting the commission.
Mr Rozen said the advisers were meant to examine incident controllers’ plans to check they prioritised the safety of firefighters, but that even control centres in charges of the biggest and most deadly fires that day, failed to appoint them.
“What we have is not an isolated example but a widespread non-compliance across a number of ICCs on what was recognised by all involved as the worst imaginable day, not only for the community of Victoria, but also for firefighter safety,” he said.
Mr Rozen said injuries and near-misses that could have produced multiple fatalities suggested much went wrong with safety on Black Saturday. He argued that Victoria should adopt the US-style system of fire safety officers, who have the right to veto operation plans that endangered firefighters.
Mr Rozen also criticised the internal inquiries run by the CFA into safety incidents. He said three crews out of the 19 crews who were hit by burnovers that day had been endangered when a wind-change warning was issued with the wrong time. An internal inquiry found this left them with a false sense of security.
But the incident controller who had authorised the incorrect warning had not been interviewed or notified of the inquiry’s findings, which indirectly criticised him, Mr Rozen said.
Neil Clelland, SC, for the state, said the CFA alone used 16,000 firefighters that day but only one had died, and he was not on duty. This indicated sound management, he said.

First published in The Age.

CFA chief a sacrificial lamb, QC tells fire probe

CFA chief Russell Rees had been singled out as a sacrificial lamb, “perhaps on the idea that the public needs to see a scalp taken as a result of this proceeding”, his lawyer told the Bushfires Royal Commission yesterday.
Julian Burnside, QC, said the commission had criticised Mr Rees unfairly and he had been “hounded in his evidence by counsel assisting”.
Mr Burnside said Mr Rees had shared responsibility on Black Saturday with the chief fire officer of the Department of Sustainability and Environment, Ewan Waller. But the transcript of Mr Rees’s evidence ran to 480 pages of largely hostile questioning, and Mr Waller’s to only 220 pages of mainly friendly examination, he said.
“The distinction between the two is most striking and is continued in the content of chapter nine, especially, of the interim report,” he said. “Unless there is personal fault found against either Mr Rees or Mr Waller, it would be grossly unfair to single one of them out for responsibility because the joint enterprise did not avoid the tragic consequences of Black Saturday . . . It is inappropriate to blame either of them, but it is grossly inappropriate and grossly unfair to blame just one of them.”
Mr Burnside said attacks on Mr Rees were ill conceived as expert witnesses had said emergency systems must be decentralised and those at the top should not interfere with those on the ground. He received a testy response from chairman Bernard Teague, who told him to hurry up as he was getting “a little tedious”
Jack Rush, QC, senior counsel assisting the commission, denied any difference in the approach taken to Mr Waller.
He said the extra pages of transcript reflected the broader responsibilities of the CFA, which managed most of the large fires on Black Saturday.
DSE manages fires that start on Crown land and was responsible for managing the Murrindindi fire, among others.
Mr Rees told the inquiry a major cause of the failure to issue warnings to people in the path of the Kilmore East fire was the move that summer to an integrated headquarters housing the CFA and DSE. He said in the CFA’s own headquarters, the information unit that released warnings sat near the state duty officer, “so it was very easy to tell when things weren’t going right”.
In the integrated headquarters, the two information units were together, but the two state duty officers were side by side in a separate room from the units: “In bringing the unit together, we solved one problem, but I believe we created another.”
He admitted headquarters had had no quality assurance process to ensure warnings matched predictions for the path of fires. Last summer, one person reporting directly to the chiefs was given that task. He said DSE firefighters should be under CFA command and warned that climate change meant Victoria must keep fire preparations at a high level to be ready for “that cataclysmic event”.
Mr Rees’s resignation from the CFA takes effect next month.
Police and Emergency Services Minister Bob Cameron will testify at the inquiry on Friday after a request from the commission this week.

State ‘against’ fire service merger

THE state government opposes merging all its fire services into one agency, partly because of problems with a hostile firefighters union, the Bushfires Royal Commission heard yesterday.
The stance was announced by Penny Armytage, secretary of the Department of Justice, in evidence that effectively silenced fire chiefs who had been asked by the inquiry to comment on the issue.
In her witness statement, Ms Armytage said amalgamation would be unlikely to bring great benefits and instead would disrupt the system, leaving its members more focused on their own futures than the need to plan for bushfires. She said it would probably cause:
■Despondency, loss of confidence and resignations.
■Loss of experience, as many senior staff would not find a place in the new entity.
■A long period of looking inward as staff jostled for position rather than focused on work benefiting the community.
She said that given “the present context” and climate change, “the state simply cannot afford to break in a new system, that is, suffer a loss — even temporarily — of operational effectiveness and continuity.”
The CFA, Metropolitan Fire Brigade and the Department of Sustainability and Environment had been asked to comment on amalgamation, but Ms Armytage told the inquiry that she was giving the “state-endorsed view from a whole-of-government perspective”.
In 2003, the CFA told the Esplin bushfire inquiry that it should take over the firefighting functions of the DSE, which manages forest fires.
Ms Armytage dodged questions from Rachel Doyle, SC, about whether the CFA had changed its stance on this, and about whether any of the fire chiefs had alternative proposals.
Ms Armytage said the agencies “have acknowledged the state’s position”.
The fact that the United Firefighters Union’s relationship with the management of the CFA and the MFB “could be characterised at times as being quite hostile and acrimonious” was a factor in the state’s decision, she said.
The government was also concerned that volunteers might be sidelined or disaffected by any structural changes.
The chief executive of the CFA, Mick Bourke, agreed under questioning that the CFA had asked last July for funding for another 684 career firefighters to cope with growing populations on the urban fringe.
He said he wrote to the UFU last month saying that he had written to Ms Armytage at the board’s request, telling her that the funding was a priority.
Ms Armytage said no decision would be made about the funding until after the commission’s final report, due in July.
Mr Bourke said the CFA’s current position on amalgamation was that the government should decide. In regard to union problems, he said the CFA had “some strong monopoly traits” and he hoped to work out good outcomes for all parties over time.

Volunteers and career firemen at loggerheads

THE often-hostile divide between the CFA’s volunteer and career firefighters widened yesterday as they staked out different sides of a turf war in a hearing of the Bushfires Royal Commission.
The United Firefighters Union wants all Victoria’s fire services merged into one, and about 10,000 volunteers ditched in favour of career officers.
Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria opposed amalgamation and said it would damage the CFA’s community-oriented culture.
David Ackland, a volunteer firefighter in Seymour, said he would probably leave if any amalgamation of the CFA and the Metropolitan Fire Brigade led to a devaluing of volunteers.
“The way I see amalgamation is the start of the end of volunteerism,” he said. “I see career firefighters coming into my brigade . . . and basically taking over. I have seen and heard through the state where there’s a bit of friction [between the two groups] . . . I don’t want to see that happen. My region is totally volunteer firefighters and we are proud of that and we don’t want to see career staff coming into our stations.”
Mr Ackland and other witnesses painted a portrait of an agency captive to the union of its career officers, with the UFU allegedly having power of veto over CFA management decisions about issues ranging from protective clothing to the resourcing of volunteer brigades.
Mr Ackland said his region recently spent two years without a sessional instructor to provide training because career officers did not want the job but volunteers were effectively locked out of applying for it.
“This caused a great deal of unnecessary frustration for the volunteers,” he said. He would not want to put up with the inconvenience of workplace agreements, he said.
Professor David Hayward, dean of the school of global studies, social science and planning at RMIT, presented a report commissioned by the UFU that argued for a shift to career firefighters for large regional centres and for the whole of metropolitan Melbourne (one-third of greater Melbourne now falls under the CFA).
This would reduce duplication and difficulties associated with different equipment, uniforms and communications, he said.
Under his model of a Victorian Fire Board with a rural and an urban division, the reliance on volunteers would be lowered but it was not intended that it would disappear, he said. Professor Hayward said that over the next 30 years communities of only a few thousand people, such as Officer, would take on an inner-city character with new multi-storey dwellings that would require more urban firefighting techniques.
Lex de Man, a CFA area manager, said that in 2009, the CFA responded to 30,876 urban incidents and 8664 rural incidents, and the value of the work done by volunteers had been estimated at up to $840 million a year.
He acknowledged “there are tensions at times” between volunteers and career officers. Professor Hayward’s model would mean the loss of about 10,000 volunteers, he said.
Volunteer Firefighters Victoria CEO Andrew Ford said he had not seen any model of amalgamation that he believed would satisfy volunteers.

‘I thought Nixon was on duty’

VICTORIA Police senior command was in disarray on Black Saturday, with Christine Nixon’s deputy yesterday telling the Bushfires Royal Commission that he believed she was formally on duty on that day.
Deputy commissioner Kieran Walshe also yesterday became the second senior officer forced to correct mistakes in earlier evidence. He admitted errors about his contact with Ms Nixon on the day and over the time he left home to go to police headquarters that evening.
Mr Walshe said he spoke to Ms Nixon on the Thursday before the fires, and it was arranged that she would be on duty and he would be on standby. “I had understood she was on duty from shortly before 1pm,” he said in a witness statement. “It is my belief that we did discuss what we would do on the weekend, because I did tell [an assistant commissioner] that I would be on standby at home on the Saturday.”
This appears to contradict Ms Nixon, who initially said in a statement to the commission that she “prepared for an active day”, but later said she was not rostered on. She spent parts of Black Saturday having a haircut, being interviewed by a biographer and going out to dinner.
Asked whether she had treated the day as if she had been on duty, she said it was not her job to swoop in and take control when she had officers such as Mr Walshe who were more experienced in emergency management.
“We always had the view that any of us were available 24 hours a day and that we could either come in ourselves if we saw it was necessary or, in fact, be called in if we thought that was appropriate,” she told the commission. “That was probably the model that was put in place.”
Mr Walshe said that he did not know why Ms Nixon had told the commission that she felt able to leave emergency headquarters at 6 pm on Black Saturday partly because she knew Mr Walshe was coming in at around 7pm.
Mr Walshe said he had not spoken to her, and he had intended to go straight to police headquarters, not the emergency centre: “I could only assume that it was her belief that when I came in that I would have gone to [emergency headquarters]. I had no conversation with her at any time.”
Mr Walshe agreed under questioning by counsel assisting the commission, Melinda Richards, that telephone records showed he had been wrong to testify last year that he had been in touch with Ms Nixon throughout the day: “That was my honest belief at the time. Certainly, having the ability to do some forensic sort of examination of the telephone records, it is quite clear that I did not do that.”
Ms Nixon was forced to correct evidence that she spoke to Mr Walshe during the day, in which 173 people were killed.
Mr Walshe said he spoke to Ms Nixon for the first time that day in a conference call at 9.45 pm to discuss a media briefing.
He had previously told the commission that he left home about 7pm to go to police headquarters. He admitted yesterday that this was closer to 8pm because he was delayed making personal phone calls.
He said he had been trying to assist his son-in-law contact relatives who lived in Strathewen. “He was quite concerned about their welfare, as was I, as was my daughter. I was endeavouring to assist him as best I could, so I made some phone calls.” Mr Walshe also rang his sister at Maiden Gully about her welfare.
Ms Richards asked: “It is apparent, is it not, that [Ms Nixon] was not actively carrying out the role of deputy coordinator of emergency response on that evening and neither were you?”
Mr Walshe disagreed, saying Ms Nixon had to be satisfied only that arrangements were in place and were working.
The commission was also shown an email by a police sergeant, Darren Dew, who said a police unit charged with helping provide resources, the State Emergency Response Co-ordination Centre, was closed at midnight “when the fire was still out of control and massive evacuations were taking place”. He said he could not believe the centre had been closed.
He said that, at the time it was closed: “The fire was still out of control on several fronts. There were two death tolls on the board, Confirmed 6 and Unconfirmed 76. At that stage they knew that Kinglake had disappeared . . . Common sense would dictate that hundreds of people would have been evacuated or displaced.”
Mr Walshe said the SERCC had not been closed and two officers had handled requests for resources overnight.

Most fire victims failed to prepare

FORTY-FOUR per cent of those who died in the Black Saturday fires had a disability, were in ill health or were aged over 69 or under 12, and one woman was eight months pregnant, the Bushfires Royal Commission was told yesterday.
In the first detailed analysis of 172 fatalities to be made public, Professor John Handmer also reported that several couples had argued over what to do, with the man in each case wanting to stay.
“There are several instances where women who fled survived,” he said. “There is also evidence of disagreement where women stayed, leading to more fatalities.”
Fifty-eight per cent of those who died made no preparations for fire, with 53 per cent having no fire plan, and 25 per cent having no general knowledge of bushfire.
“A few fatalities were in denial of the fire threat to the last, purposefully ignoring — in some cases, mocking — the advice of friends, relatives or agencies,” said Professor Handmer. “These people had made a conscious decision to take no action.”
The findings by Professor Handmer, a disaster management expert at the Centre for Risk and Community Safety at RMIT, and two other researchers, prompted a fierce attack on the stay-or-go policy by senior counsel Jack Rush, QC, who asked whether the policy should be buried as it had failed to prompt many people to prepare.
Only 20 per cent of those who died were well prepared to stay and defend, while a further 14 per cent had made some attempt. This was despite the fact the definition of “prepared” was minimal: a water supply and mops and buckets to use as firefighting equipment.
Professor Handmer agreed the policy required a great deal of re-evaluation. Fourteen per cent of people died trying to flee, even though the policy warned late evacuation was likely to be deadly, and 27 per cent died in bathrooms, a place the policy had not suggested for refuge.
Mr Rush suggested the room might have been chosen because it had water and no windows that could explode and allow embers in.
Some children were found dead in little more than bathers, despite warnings to cover up, and one-third of those who died were in houses that might not have been defendable. Strong winds left some homes defenceless by lifting roofs or blowing windows in, he said.
But people unexpectedly survived by sheltering in cars, sometimes by moving from one site to another to avoid heat and flames. There was not a single fatality among women and children trying to evacuate by car.
Professor Handmer speculated that modern cars might provide better protection than in the past, and said there was also evidence that modern homes were less defendable because they were often large and had two storeys.
Thirty-four per cent of those who died had intended to stay and defend, 26 per cent had wanted to wait and see, 15 per cent had no discernible intentions, eight per cent stayed to shelter but not defend, and 16 per cent had intended to leave. The report said few of those who died had contingency plans, and 30 per cent were taken by surprise by fire.
Professor Handmer agreed fire agencies had known for more than a decade that many people ignored the policy and planned to wait and see on a fire-danger day.

Blame laid with CFA, Brumby

FIRE chief Russell Rees and the CFA failed to protect Victorians from the Black Saturday bushfires and should be forced to take greater responsibility to avoid a repeat disaster, the Bushfires Royal Commission has said.

In its interim report, the commission said the Victorian Government should revamp its controversial Stay or Go policy, with the CFA required to tell home owners whether or not their house was defendable.

It said the CFA’s chief officer Rees did not become involved in hands-on management on Black Saturday “even when the disastrous consequences of the fires began to emerge”.

The report said Mr Rees did not check warnings about the Kilmore fire that killed 121, did not speak to controllers at the two centres managing that fire, and did not know of fire behaviour experts or their predictions for the Kilmore blaze.

The commission said all this meant it was “difficult to understand” how the CFA lived up to its responsibility to give local communities information to ensure their safety.

The CFA should have accepted that issuing warnings was part of its job on Black Saturday, even though this was not spelled out in legislation, the report said.

It recommended that the law be changed to make it clear that warnings and advice to relocate were the responsibility of the agency managing a fire.

The report stopped short of suggesting the Stay or Go policy be ditched, but said people should be warned that staying to defend carried many risks, including death. Its 51 recommendations include:

– The re-introduction of community refuges.

– Incident controllers to be given more responsibility for issuing warnings, even when they are not managing the fire concerned.

– Emergency call services including triple-zero be boosted on high-risk days.

The report exposed bungles at the highest level, with the State Emergency Response Plan (SERP) not defining who was responsible for warnings and recommending evacuations.

“In addition, the means by which warnings were issued and evacuations were made on 7 February bore little resemblance to the arrangements in the SERP,” the report said.

“Diffuse or unclear responsibility for warnings and relocation is at best unhelpful and at worst life-threatening.”

The report recommended that whichever agency was responsible for an individual fire – the CFA or the Department of Sustainability and Environment – it should also be responsible for warnings and advice to relocate.

It gave a detailed analysis of what went wrong with management of the Kilmore fire. The commission heard evidence that warnings were drafted but not issued, due to CFA protocol, or authorised but not aired, due to internal communications problems.

The commissioners – chairman Bernard Teague, Susan Pascoe and Ron McLeod – made several recommendations that flowed from this.

They called for all incident control centres to be properly staffed and equipped; for the most experienced controller available to be appointed, regardless of which agency was managing the fire; and for senior controllers to be authorised to issue warnings they believed necessary, even if the warnings related to a fire being managed from another centre.

The Stay or Go policy and bushfire brochures had failed to emphasise adequately the risks of staying and defending, the commission said.

“The risks should be spelt out more plainly, including the risk of death,” the report said. “People should also be encouraged to recognise that not all houses are defendable in all situations and contingencies need to be considered in case the plan to stay and defend fails.”

The CFA should have the authority to give specific advice about the defendability of individual properties and whether residents should leave.

“For those who plan to leave, there should be more explicit advice on triggers that should be used to determine when to do so,” the report said.

People also needed more options than stay or go, because the preferred option might not be possible or might fail. “The availability of local areas of refuge is an important and essential complement to the ‘Stay or Go’ policy.”

The commission welcomed the State Government’s announcement of “neighbourhood safer places” to provide informal shelter but also recommended the setting up of community refuges, which should be defended by the CFA during a fire.

It said the lack of refuges failed people who found themselves in danger when their plans failed, were overwhelmed by circumstances, changed their minds or had no plan.

“The lack of refuges in Victoria also fails to assist people in areas threatened by fire who are away from their homes, such as employees, visitors, tourists, travellers and campers.”

The report recommended that Victoria Police review its guidelines on roadblocks, which were inflexible, and upset people who were already under pressure.

The commission recommended that warnings be clearer, that commercial radio and television stations also be allowed to issue them, and that sirens be played before the broadcasting of serious warnings to alert listeners to pay attention. It said community warning sirens should be re-introduced in towns that wanted them, and it recommended increasing the capacity of the triple-zero service and the Victorian Bushfire Information Line – which failed to answer 80 per cent of calls on February 7 – to handle spikes in volume.

It also suggested that a single multi-agency “portal” for bushfires be designed to allow incident control centres to post information and warnings directly. The portal should upload information simultaneously to both CFA and DSE websites.

Premier John Brumby said action was under way on most of the 51 recommendations. The Government would respond to all by August 31.

“The single most important responsibility I have got between now and the rest of the year is to make our state as fire-safe and as fire-ready as possible,” he said. He said the report “is basically endorsing ‘Stay or Go’, but what they are saying is that there needs to be a much stronger focus on leaving early”.

Millions of dollars had already been allocated to new fire-safety initiatives, including an $11.5 million public education campaign on the importance of leaving early, $30 million to upgrade incident control centres, and $167 million to improve emergency services communication systems. On the question of who should take responsibility for system failures on Black Saturday, Mr Brumby said: “There were systems which worked well on the day and systems which didn’t . . . (but) we had more than 600 fires that day.”

Nationals leader Peter Ryan said the report was a damning “catalogue of tragic failures” and showed the GBlame laid with CFA, Brumby overnment had failed to fix problems they knew might lead to a tragedy.

“The unfortunate truth is that much of what has led to [the deaths of 173 people] was known to the Government and the agencies before these events transpired,” he said. “There are across many of [the report’s] pages findings that I think are very compelling in terms of a criticism of the Government, its lack of preparation in relation to the day’s events, the fact that for many years – particularly in relation to warnings – they knew or they should have known there were deficiencies there that needed to be accommodated.”

THE CFA SHOULD …

– ADVISE people in bushfire-prone areas the safest option is always to leave rather than stay and defend. Children, the elderly and infirm should not fight fires.

– GIVE chief officer Russell Rees legislated responsibility for issuing warnings to the public.

– ENSURE warnings focus on maximising potential to save lives, and include a level above extreme.

– ISSUE more explicit information about risks and give specific advice about the defendability of individual properties.

– DIRECT firefighting resources, as a priority, to refuges where people are sheltering.

– RECOMMEND residents ‘relocate’ rather than stay and defend.

GOVERNMENT SHOULD…

– IDENTIFY neighbourhood safe areas such as car parks, sporting grounds, amenities blocks and dam walls that could be used as community refuges.

– INVESTIGATE technical possibility of sending warning messages to mobile phones by the 2009-10 bushfire season

– DEVELOP guidelines for use of fire station sirens to alert communities to bushfire threats.

THE MEDIA

– END ABC’S exclusive role as emergency broadcaster and enlist commercial networks in disseminating bushfire warnings.

Four die as two men turn back

MELBOURNE

A FAMILY’S attempt to flee a burning home on Black Saturday failed when two men turned back to rescue a mother and child, and all four perished, the Bushfires Royal Commission heard yesterday.
Gary Bartlett and his friend Michael Real turned back to the house from the gate of the Bartletts’ property in St Andrews when they realised that Jacinta Bartlett and daughter Erryn, 6, were not behind them.
The only survivor of the family was Erryn’s sister, 12-year-old Maddison Bartlett. Maddison and another family friend, Judith Hawkins, fled 500 metres down the road to a dam, where both sheltered successfully despite Maddison’s life-threatening burns.
In parts of her statement read yesterday to the Bushfire Royal Commission, Ms Hawkins said that she and Mr Real were guests of the Bartletts on Black Saturday. They went into the house when they heard the roar of a bushfire but tried to flee when windows on the upper storey exploded inwards and an internal staircase caught fire.
Mr Bartlett said they had to get out, opened the door and then slammed it shut again. Then he said, “We’ve got to get out or we’ll die.”
Ms Hawkins said she had pulled on Mrs Bartlett’s arms and told her to get out, “but Jacinta appeared to be in shock”.
When Mr Bartlett opened the door a second time, he ran out, followed by Mr Real, Ms Hawkins and Maddison.
At the gate of the property, 30 metres from the house, Mr Bartlett stopped and asked, “Where are the others?”
Ms Hawkins reported, “I just said, ‘They wouldn’t come.’ Gary turned around to go back to them and Michael just turned around too and followed him.”
Ms Hawkins and Maddison jogged half a kilometre down the road, clutching wet hand towels to their faces to protect against smoke: “I just remember saying out loud, ‘Got to keep moving.’ ”
Fire crews found the two and poured drinking water on Maddison’s burns before lifting her into the back of a police car, which drove her to an ambulance. Ms Hawkins also sustained serious injuries.
Ms Hawkins later told police that the family had been keeping watch on smoke coming over Mount Sugarloaf, with Maddison checking websites on her laptop.
They had filled gutters with water but had not been worried about fire that day: “It was almost like they didn’t realise it would get to them.”
Friends of Mr Bartlett told police that he had planned to leave in the case of a bad fire.
The Brown family of Bald Spur Road had also planned to leave in case of fire and that afternoon had thought the Kilmore fire to be “miles away”, Adrian Brown, 33, told his father by MSN Messenger. He and his wife, Mirabelle, 30, and their three children — Eric, 8, Matthew, 7 and Brielle, 3 — died in their home.
Bald Spur residents Richard and Eileen Zann, their daughter Eva Zann and neighbour Karma Hastwell, 88, had also planned to leave the mountain in case of fire but were probably caught by surprise on Black Saturday, the inquiry heard. Their remains were found in the Zann house.
Sam Matthews, 22, died alone at St Andrews trying to defend the family home.
Hearings on the Kilmore East fire continue today.

CFA pagers failed on Black Saturday

MELBOURNE

THE Country Fire Authority’s pager system had a huge message backlog on Black Saturday because many messages were unnecessarily sent more than once, the Bushfires Royal Commission heard yesterday.
A report into the pager problems, commissioned by the CFA, concluded that the delays were due to the volume of incidents and the “ballooning effect” of individual messages being linked to multiple recipients.
Consultancy firm Mingara Services reported that:
■There were 10,624 messages logged that day but only 3043 were unique messages.
■Some messages were transmitted up to 90 times.
■Administrative messages were delivered up to 12 hours late and non-emergency messages up to 2½ hours late, but emergency messages were all delivered within 76 seconds.
Of non-emergency messages, 5703 of 7784 were delivered outside the two-minute benchmark, and of 3533 administrative messages, 1069 were delivered outside the five-minute benchmark. Administrative messages are the only level open to firefighters who want to send out information.
Ian Powell, manager planning and strategy with the CFA’s technology services, agreed under questioning that some non-emergency and administrative messages that day contained urgent news such as wind-change warnings.
The Age revealed last week that on Black Saturday the emergency pager system was locked down to 20 per cent of capacity by the government and the CFA, which were concerned that a high volume of messages would create black spots across the state. The 29,000 pagers alert firefighters.
Mingara found that the pager system on Black Saturday was congested by duplication and linkage of messages, which meant one message automatically went to several recipients. The problems would have been lessened if the system had been set up with messages delinked, which would have required two messages rather than eight to activate a strike team, for example, said counsel assisting the commission, Melinda Richards.
The company running the pager system reported that if messages had not been linked on Black Saturday it would have cut the sending time of emergency messages by 14 per cent, non-emergency messages by 83 per cent and administrative messages by 55 per cent.
Mr Powell said the CFA had mostly removed linked messages. But it had not taken up Mingara’s suggestion that CFA users be given access to the emergency and non-emergency levels of messages, which have higher priority.
It was believed CFA staff were not in a position to prioritise emergency messages, Mr Powell said. He said problems with limited radio channels that day could have been avoided with better communications planning and radio discipline. He said some black spots remained because of lack of funds.
The Justice Department’s emergency services policy and support director Craig Lloyd said a new public safety communications strategy had been approved and goes to cabinet today. The current system covered 98 per cent of people and 95 per cent of the state, he said, but aspects of the system were run by different contractors, making change complex.

A Kinglake family falls between the cracks

MELBOURNE

REBECCA and Darren Webber say they knew they were in for a rough ride when they decided to go through with the purchase of a property in Kinglake after Black Saturday.
They had paid a deposit for their dream home weeks earlier, and when it was destroyed by fire, they thought the insurance they had taken out on it would pay for rebuilding.
Instead, they have battled a series of misfortunes that left them homeless. “We didn’t know it would be this rough,” says Mrs Webber, her voice breaking.
With their three small children, including four-month-old Eden, the Webbers have spent the past six weeks living in a friend’s shed.
Mrs Webber had wanted to move to Kinglake to give her children the benefits of the great outdoors — fishing, hiking, bike-riding — but instead has been fighting to keep the great outdoors from invading them with mice, wasps and millipedes.
Their immediate housing problems were solved last week, when they were given the keys to a unit in Kinglake’s temporary village for bushfire survivors.
The Webbers qualified for the unit and for a bushfires case manager, and had earlier qualified for a bushfire caravan and portable bathroom that housed them for several months.
Mrs Webber says they had to move out of the caravan because it was too small after the baby was born: “There wasn’t room for all the stuff you need to look after a baby, and there was no way to keep her warm.”
But the Webbers do not qualify for any grants from the Victorian Bushfire Appeal Fund. They applied for a rebuilding grant and for a transitional housing payment and both were refused. They appealed on compassionate grounds and this was also denied.
The vendor of their property, who was the formal owner of the house on the date that it burned down, qualified for payments and took them. He was paid final settlement by the Webbers on March 20 last year.
It is the Webbers who now find themselves bearing bushfire-related hardships that they had not anticipated. They are paying a mortgage, but the 12 months of accommodation payments from their insurance company have run out, and the house is not rebuilt.
They are reeling from the extra costs involved in having to rebuild to fire-resistant standards. They also made a mistake in asking an architect to design their new home. They told him the budget was $300,000 but his design was costed by builders at $900,000, so the $50,000 they spent on design and surveying for that project was lost.
After enduring illness with a high-risk pregnancy last year, Mrs Webber, a credit manager, has had to return to work early and become the main breadwinner as her income is higher than that of Mr Webber, who is a plasterer.
Mr Webber says, “More than anything, I am disappointed in the way this has been handled, how long it’s taken, and the fact that we only ever acted on the advice of our case managers and basically all of that has been thrown back in our faces.”
In a statement to The Age, the bushfire fund said it operated on the principle that anyone whose primary place of residence was destroyed or damaged in the fires was in hardship, and that $140 million had been paid out.
“In the circumstances of Mrs Webber and her family, they chose to go ahead with the purchase of a property that was destroyed by the bushfires. They did not own the property at the time of the bushfires. The appeal fund money was not intended to go to people in these circumstances.
“If the Webbers signed a contract that in some way locked them into the sale, regardless of the condition of their property, then the fund may reconsider their case. However, to date they have not provided the appeal fund with that evidence.”
Mrs Webber says, “What they are saying to me is, ‘You made your bed and you lie in it, you and your children.’ Nobody could have predicted what it was going to be like trying to rebuild. We couldn’t foresee all of this when we decided to go ahead with buying the house.”
The fund said that the Webbers’s case was not affected by the fact that the previous owner had already claimed grants for that address: “The owner’s case was considered separately and that individual’s circumstances taken into account when providing support.”
The house was to be the Webbers’s first home.