Crispin Hull

Major telecommunications companies got thousands of Canberrans reconnected quickly after the fires.

As well as overhead lines, a major fibre-optic cable was destroyed when rats frenzied in the fire and chewed through it.

Telstra said 6000 homes lost telephone services because of the fire.

Telstra Country Wide regional managing director Roger Bamber said Telstra had on the ground almost 400 staff who had restored telephone services to about 3500 customers within the first few days and the remaining reconnected within a week.

Carriers gave special deals to enable residents to divert to mobiles or another landline without extra charges.

Telstra provided four caravans with phones at the evacuation centres immediately after the fire.
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On the evening before the January 18 fires, Di Butcher went to the Emergency Services Bureau.

In nearly every emergency the Child Protection Service of the ACT Department of Education, Youth and Family Services is on hand. Not only for children, but they also help adults after accidents, deaths and other traumatic events.

It was obvious that help would be needed with people in the ACT’s rural areas as fires swept through rural areas. She and six others from her service worked till late Friday night ringing rural people and were back at 7.30am the next day.

“Then our role became ginormous over a very quick period — a few hours,” she said.

On the Tuesday morning her boss, Sue Birtles, tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to manage the about to be established Recovery Centre. The head of her department, Fran Hinton, wanted it up and running by the Thursday.

The vacant former Lyons Primary School was chosen.

“I got there at 10.30 and got out of the car and there was nothing, absolutely nothing,” she said. “No carpets. No desks. Just an empty building with broken glass.

“Within half an hour and fleet of Totalcare trucks pulled up. What to want; what do you need? They were excellent. They worked around the clock. Furniture, computers, the lot.”
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The strong bonding created during the bushfires and their immediate aftermath is now giving way to cleavages among those affected.

Recovery from a disaster takes longer and is more complicated than many think.

Dr Rob Gordon is a Melbourne consulting psychologist brought in by the Recovery Centre to help people affected by the fires.

He has helped in many disasters, including Port Arthur, the Ash Wednesday bushfires and the Bali bombings. He has given several presentations to those affected by the Canberra fires including firefighters and recovery staff.

He confirms what has been found by staff at the Recovery Centre – that unexpected issues evolve; that the time expected for recovery is long and that reactions and processes are confusing and unexpected.

A disaster is different from a typical community crisis. In a crisis – one road accident, one fire, one siege, one murder – the framework of stable community life stays in place. It means the usual designated emergency services can come quickly to help. The community structure keeps its order.

But a disaster is different. It disrupts the community itself because it overwhelms normal community systems.
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The people who suffered damage in the bushfires were badly underinsured, both for building and contents.

But only a very small percentage were not insured at all for buildings. The Canberra non-insurance figure was about 1 per cent, compared to nearly 25 per cent in the 1994 bushfires in and around Sydney. Only six of the 500 destroyed houses were uninsured and only four partly destroyed houses were uninsured.

This was because of the charater of the affected suburbs – 30 years old and populated by a higher portion of people in their 50s who have lived in the same place for a long time. They tend to be prudent enough to insure but unaware of the large increases in building costs and the large increases in the costs of replacing old contents with new contents or replacing all the new furniture and other goods that they have brought into the home. Also, most people have to have insurance if they have a mortgage.

However 20 per cent of those affected did not have contents insurance.

The National Co-ordinator of the Insurance Disaster Response Organisation, Christopher Henri, interviewed more than 100 of those afftected and gathered statistics on all of them.
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The bushfires have made householders more aware of fire safety around the home, according to the 2003 AAMI Firescreen survey.

“Almost one-quarter of Australians have taken extra fire precautions, as a result of the recent bushfires,” AAMI public affairs manager Geoff Hughes said. “Fifteen per cent of householders responded by clearing gutters and 14 per cent responded by clearing trees and branches around the house.

“They have also taken measures such as developing an escape plan in the event of a fire, removing rubbish from around the house and purchasing fire equipment, including fire extinguishers and smoke alarms.

“We found residents in bushfire-prone areas reacted most strongly to the fires. More than three out of every five residents in bushfire-prone areas have taken extra fire precautions since the January bushfire disaster.”

The two most common new precautions were clearing gutters (15 per cent) and clearing trees and branches around the house (14 per cent).

Householders also took extra measures such as developing a fire plan, removing rubbish from around the house and purchasing fire equipment, including fire extinguishers and smoke alarms.
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A few weeks before the January fires, ActewAGL conducted a simulation exercise involving a truck crashing into a main water-supply dam.

This exercise tested matters like water contamination, how to respond and deal with the threat to the water supply.

Low and behold, on January 13, five days before the fires hit Canberra, a helicopter fighting fires crashed into Bendora Dam, one of the ACT’s major water storages. It created potential health concerns over aviation fuel in the drinking water.

The real test was to come.

ActewAGL continuously looks at its engineering, environmental management, innovation, contingency planning, safety and management of infrastructure restoration.

It looks at risk assessment and mitigation, regular crisis simulation and extensive emergency response training. It has a specialist risk management engineer.

Before January 18, ActewAGL had identified both bushfires and water supply contamination as high operational risks.
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Operations

Within a day of the fires, the ACT Planning and Land Authority (formerly PALM) was involved in a team effort that set up a cross-government and industry Property Assessment and Recovery Team. PART, as it would be known, at one stage involved more than 50 organisations.

“Every day more and more people would turn up at the meetings,” recalls Ros Chivers, the Bushfire Coordinator at the ACT Planning and Land Authority. “It was amazing to think that so many people from so many different areas were all needed to work on starting the recovery.”

A quick trawl of the PART meeting would reveal updates on restoring essential services of electricity, water and gas; site inspections and data collection; demolition and development approval, insurance, housing and new offers of help.

Says Ros: “The PART meetings ensured that a whole host of different organisations knew what was happening across the recovery effort at the same time.”

It meant that within the first week, ACTPLA had produced, on behalf of PART, the first step-by-step guide for Canberrans to make their property safe. Within a month, a series of five fact sheets were available, which is now called the Guide to Rebuilding After Bushfire.
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Leading Australian general insurer, NRMA Insurance took help to the next level by reminding residents of important considerations needed after a home has been destroyed by fire, storm, earthquake or cyclone.

Through its experience as a leading general insurer for more than 75 years, NRMA Insurance has helped customers through many major claims events such as the Newcastle earthquake, Sydney hailstorms, Wollongong floods and the recent NSW and ACT bushfires.

Group Executive of Personal Insurance, Rick Jackson, said the destruction caused by the Canberra bushfires was an example of how natural disaster can strike quickly, leaving a trail of destruction and many people overwhelmed by the recovery process.

“Following a natural disaster, NRMA Insurance provides help beyond simply paying our customers’ claims. We take pride in being on the ground in the affected area to help provide emergency funds, organise trauma counselling and temporary accommodation for customers who cannot live in their homes,” Mr Jackson said. “NRMA Insurance even launched a mobile claims assessing centre called the help van which can be quickly deployed to areas affected by natural disasters.

“We understand that when the community recovers from the initial shock of the disaster and moves forward into the recovery phase, there is a demand for quality information about what to do next.
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Usually it is the bureaucrat’s ultimate nightmare – breaking new ground with no safe precedents to rely upon, no manual, no best-practice guidelines and models to ensure all bums are covered, all decisions justifiable, all funds accounted for and all careers protected.

Whatever finger-pointing goes on about the lead-up to the fire, it appears that the recovery work and administration has been exemplary. Well this is Canberra, so we should do those things well. There has been hardly a peep of criticism about the running of the Bushfire Recovery Centre – a good test for smooth administration.

There was little warning.

The manager of the centre, Di Butcher, taken from the child protection service of the Department of Education Youth and Family Service, found the experience surreal.

Usually human services are always struggling in terms of both physical and financial resources. Each area of service delivery has its own procedures, means of reporting and ways of doing things.
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The fires will have a profound effect on the way Canberra is planned and developed – and not just in the suburbs that are rebuilt.

Four major studies will look at lessons to be learned from the fires and future land uses.

This month a discussion paper resulted from the Non-Urban Study. It suggested a range of possible sustainable uses of non-urban land, such as the rural areas, nature reserves and national parks. It will include suggestions about the burnt-out Stromlo area, including the possibility of residential development there. Before the fires, that was not a possibility. The study, which will be completed in October, will also make recommendations about the future of pine plantations.

The Urban Edge Review will look at design standards and guidelines, and management approaches for Canberra’s urban edge. The urban edge is the land that abuts the metropolitan area, and open spaces that link the urban interface with the residential areas, such as roadways. The review will assess whether any areas should be declared bushfire-prone.

ACT Forests Business Case will look at plantation forestry in the ACT.
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