National DesignShop Scaled Bushfire Advice & Warning
In February 2009 the people of Victoria faced an historically unprecedented challenge: the fires of Black Saturday. Never before had Australia’s emergency services and government agencies experienced fires on such a catastrophic scale, and the systems and processes in place at the time were pushed to their absolute limit to effectively manage the situation.
Download as PDFAs a result of this situation and in light of information from the Bureau of
Meteorology which suggests that similar weather patterns which led to Black Saturday
will occur more frequently in the future, revision of the Fire Dangers Advice
and Warning model was required.
As a result, the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council
(AFAC), the peak body or fire, land management and emergency service organisations
in Australia and New Zealand, commissioned Capgemini for a 3-Day Accelerated Solutions
Environment DesignShop® aimed at creating a new national model to provide updated
advice and warnings to the community for bushfires that was also adaptable for
other hazards.
Timescales for the complex challenge were incredibly tight. This National model
had to be implemented by 1st October 2009 in readiness for the upcoming bushfire
season.
The Event
In August 2009, the Premiere of Victoria, John Brumby opened the the three day
DesignShop® event which brought together 60 key participants representing 28 organisations
into a single environment.
The event assembled almost every important mind in the field of emergency services
and hazard response. Contributing to the process were leaders directly responsible
for the warnings process in their organisations and/or jurisdictions, as well
as community representation and subject matter experts in media, communications,
fire control and expert researchers in social and physical sciences.
The event provided the group with the vehicle for healthy debate, exploring and
challenging pre-conceived ideas and resolute positions and provided an opportunity
to present evidence and share knowledge and practices between jurisdictions and
organisations. The resulting robust decision making enabled the creation of “an
agreed national model to instigate and deliver relevant communication to the community
before and during incidents, with a focus on bushfires” and in the words of the
president of AFAC, Euan Ferguson; “sowed the seeds of generational change in fire
warnings and in fire management”
The Results
Australia’s emergency services, government agencies and community groups ended
their 3-day DesignShop not only achieving their objective of agreement on a national
model for Scaled Bushfire Advice and Warning, but exceeding their expectations
with what they were able to accomplish.
The group:
• Amended the FDR scale and agreed a new set of terms to adequately describe
the most extreme conditions (for example Black Saturday)
• Crafted key messages for agencies to communicate to the community before, during
and after fires
• Developed a tool to assist fire controllers to decide “When” and “What” advisory
messages warnings) to issue to the community
• Developed a model bringing together all the elements relevant to the warnings
process, including information flow and relationships with the key actors in the
process
• Agreed on a national implementation approach for the new model
• Designed an internal Communications plan for state implementation timelines
• Designed a testing regime for assessing effectiveness of the implementation,
and monitoring and review of processes in place
• Crafted a new slogan to represent the new national model and to replace the
‘stay or go’ term created by the media
The group expected that once the products were assembled and finessed, the products
would form potential inputs into various jurisdictional policy reviews and projects.