Page 1609 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 May 2017
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During the 2003 bushfires significant flaws were exposed in the management system of the then Emergency Services Bureau, in particular, the division of responsibilities between the ACT Rural Fire Service and ACT Fire & Rescue. As a consequence, the Emergency Services Bureau briefly became an authority independent of the Justice and Community Safety Directorate before being reincorporated as the Emergency Services Agency. Why? After the 2003 bushfires McLeod and Doogan raised serious concerns about emergency services being subject to bureaucratic control. Coroner Doogan found that placing the agency within a government department puts unnecessary layers of bureaucracy between the agency and the responsible minister. The bureaucrats concerned usually have no special knowledge of or experience in emergency management, regardless of their seniority in the bureaucracy.
The Doogan report and the McLeod inquiry both put forward recommendations for a clear division of responsibilities in relation to bushfire management and prevention. One recommended mitigation was to define a bushfire abatement zone to protect built-up areas from the possible impacts of a major bushfire event.
Mr Ron McLeod’s 2003 report, Inquiry into the Operational Response to the January 2003 Bushfires in the ACT, made the following recommendations:
• A fire-abatement zone should be defined between the north-west and western perimeter of Canberra and the Murrumbidgee River and the foothills of the Brindabella Range.
• A set of Bushfire Protection Planning Principles in relation to fire mitigation and suppression should be adopted and applied to future developments in the designated abatement zone.
• The abatement zone should be declared a bushfire-prone area, and the requirements of the Building Code of Australia—in particular, its standards for bushfire-prone areas—should be applied to all future developments in the zone.
Following the recommendations of Mr McLeod and Coroner Doogan, the Emergencies Act 2004 was enacted, which provided a bushfire abatement zone for planning and operational purposes, for the BAZ to include city areas and built-up areas and for the response arrangements at that time—see notifiable instrument 2004-499—to include that if, in the opinion of ACT Fire & Rescue, the fire poses a risk to life or property in the built-up area then ACT Fire & Rescue will assume incident control. This remained in place until the 2006 iteration, notifiable instrument 2006-221. However, in 2011 the requirements described above were removed and instead the applicable arrangement was:
If, in the opinion of the Chief Officer ACT Fire Brigade or the Chief Officer ACT Rural Fire Service, the fire is likely to escalate, or has escalated, into a complex incident threatening life, property or significant environmental assets, or multiple incidents are occurring that may compete for resources, the fire will be under the control of an off-scene located IMT. If an IMT is not in place, the Chief Officer ACT Fire Brigade and the Chief Officer ACT Rural Fire Service will liaise with each other and appoint an Incident Controller and other key IMT roles as required, taking into consideration the risk profile of the incident.
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