The Upcoming Bushfire Season

Almost four years on from Black Saturday, what does this year’s summer hold for Victoria?

Since Black Saturday

We’ve had some relatively mild summers since February/March 2009. Considering the tragedy of Black Saturday, that’s been a good thing as the Victorian community recovered from the trauma and heartbreak of our worst bushfires ever.

Most Recently

It’s only early October as I write this, but last Friday the CFA were kept busy with our first higher-temperature day of the season. They handled the day well, with good results under control quickly.
On the other hand, up in New South Wales on the same day, it wasn’t going quite so easy. The community of Wyee was endangered for at least a day, with cool weather on the Saturday bringing the needed assist.

Queensland and South Australia, too, had their share of work to do against bushfires as well over the weekend.

Again, it’s only early October. There’s still all the way through to March to get through yet.

SMEM

The social media aspect of emergencies is starting to improve greatly, with more and more emergency services adding Twitter and Facebook to their communications arsenals. Social Media Emergency (SMEM) is coming a long way since most of us had to think on our feet and learn at the deep end back in February 2009.

Then again, social media proved an asset in early 2011, with the amount of natural disasters hitting the Australasian/Oceania region in the first quarter of last year. Victoria, instead of having to face bushfires, instead faced floods, as did Queensland and especially Brisbane. Then came the Christchurch earthquake, followed by Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant problems.

The amount of Twitter and Facebook volunteers, in each of these countries or abroad, showed how social media could work with mainstream forms of emergency communication.

Complimentary Role Of Social Media

There’s definitely a complimentary role for social media to play in this field. Accent on the word complimentary…as it would be impractical to replace proven radio and other systems entirely with social media.

The Upcoming Season

Still, it’s hoped that the 2012/2013 summer brings less disaster than early 2011…I can remember being pooped completely after three months of having to relay emergency information on Twitter back then and I can tell you how exhausting it gets. That’s just the communications side…you can imagine how it would be for those in the front line, the firefighters, the emergency services (SES) people, nurses, doctors and police in any of the situations our region faced almost two years ago.

Also, just remember it’s up to each of us to be prepared and respect the conditions we have in such seasons. Fireready, firesafe.

And let’s hope the bushfire season in Australia is a quiet one.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

FireReady In November...

Mid-November 2009. Tomorrow the temperature is expected to be 36 degrees Celsius or above in Victoria. Over in South Australia, the fire level is already raised to Catastrophic under the new fire danger system. New South Wales is also expecting high temperatures too.

Those of us who were the Twitter volunteers in February and early March are already keeping our eyes on the information flow and building new resources to do a better job.

This time, the job is to prevent a recurrence of Black Saturday.

There has already been one period a week or so ago of high temperatures, so far kept under wraps by the efforts of the CFA and DSE. The alerts, prior to tomorrow, have been relatively free of anything to worry about.

Thanks to Twitter's new Lists feature, we can group those we follow and look up a whole List for a specific type of resource, be it news, CFA alerts of various types or the people we know who will do a good job. By contrast, the beta Retweet function on Twitter's web page is less useful at the moment. It doesn't RT out to third-party clients. So, it's still the standard type of retweet that will be of value in an emergency.

On the App Store for iPhone, there is now the app shown here, Fire Alerts Victoria. It is essentially a dedicated RSS reader covering all CFA information and district alerts. One drawback is that you can't retweet from it, but if you've got it on your iPhone, you'll at least have a rough idea from the CFA of areas of concern.

FireReady, now called Living With Fire, is about preparing, acting and surviving.

Preparation is crucial to avoiding a repeat of February's Black Saturday. The more you prepare, the more resources available for deciding, the better you act in a crunch. And the better you and your community survive.

That's something we all have to remember.