Two major disasters have gripped the Australian state of NSW in recent years. The summer of 2019–20 saw bushfires rage across 5.5 million hectares claiming 26 lives and destroying almost 2,500 homes. The dangerous phenomenon of fire-generated thunderstorms increased in number by 50% in that one year compared with the previous four decades. The 2022 floods saw nine lives lost with almost 15,000 homes damaged and over 5,000 of those made uninhabitable.
The challenge ahead
The eternal economic dilemma of the allocation of scarce resources to meet unlimited wants becomes increasingly difficult in a world undergoing climate change. The availability and sustainability of resources increasingly constrains the inputs while simultaneously the needs seem so much more pressing. Managing this divergence is a particular problem for emergency management as the graphic below illustrates.
Many relevant variables such as temperature are approximately normally distributed but any relevant distribution with a bulk centre tailing off to extreme values behaves similarly. Beyond some point marked by the dashed line that characterises the onset of emergency conditions, e.g. 40° temperature, the overall likelihood of that emergency corresponds to the area under the curve. As can be seen from the diagram, shifting the curve slightly leads to a disproportionately larger increase in the likelihood of emergency conditions. It is this climate-change-driven increase in the frequency and severity of weather events as described in the various Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) reports that we are beginning to experience. The trend can be expected to continue.
This recent experience of a changing environment gives pause for thought as to how fire services need to evolve over coming decades. What is the best community service offering a modern fire service can provide?
The development of urban fire services
While the historical experience varies across different jurisdictions, the underlying pattern of fire service evolution is broadly similar. From the 19th through the 20th centuries local communities or businesses met the need of suppressing urban fires by establishing local brigades with a strong emphasis on volunteers. The demands of growing cities saw the evolution of more substantial organised fire services with networks of fixed stations and fire crews and a greater emphasis on employed full-time on-duty firefighters. Improvements in fire prevention through better building codes and other regulations reduced the incidence of fire over time but other emergency work emerged to balance the workload.
Two constraints, however, have persisted as the fundamental drivers for how the evolution of urban fire services has taken place, one physical, the other economic.
Successful early intervention to suppress a fire and effect any necessary rescues is significantly affected by the physical mechanism of the onset of compartment flashover. Fire service intervention prior to flashover requires rapid response resulting in a fairly dense network of fire stations. This has certainly been a feature of metropolitan areas combined with a bias to full-time firefighters available for immediate response. This desirable practical arrangement is feasible where the population can sustain it reflected in the cost-benefit trade-off supported by the community.
While this has worked well for cities, the service options for rural and regional communities have been different. But it is precisely these communities that are bearing the brunt of more frequent disasters.
Generally, the relatively small geographical catchment that aligns with effective response times for pre-flashover intervention simply does not capture a sufficiently large population to justify the maintenance of full-time on-duty crews. The economics doesn’t stack up and so part-time auxiliary or volunteer arrangements are required. Apart from extending response times, these arrangements have suffered from a trend of declining volunteerism in recent years. An increasing workload only exacerbates this burden.
Finding an economically justifiable improvement to service delivery for all communities, metropolitan and regional, relies on a critical review of the timescales of the various emergencies faced and how they can best be dealt with. A more balanced distribution of full-time firefighting personnel across the broader landscape and not just concentrated in metropolitan centres is likely to form part of the solution.
The character of emergencies
ν Fire – rapid response to fire is notionally based on the time to compartment flashover.
Historically this was around a 10–20-minute timeframe but research originally by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and subsequently CSIRO and Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) has shown that due to the use of synthetic furnishings this time has dropped to less than 5 minutes. In many instances, it is effectively no longer practical to expect a fire service to intervene prior to flashover in circumstances of a life-threatening developing fuel-controlled fire. The economic benefit becomes more focused on property protection through preventing fire spread.
Life safety from fire on the other hand is best dealt with through prevention including education and building inspection activities. Home fire safety checks and compliance inspections are more likely to deliver results than relying on response.
ν Road Rescue – early release and medical attention for trapped and injured people correlates highly with favourable long-term outcomes but time criticality is not as intense as for fire. The ‘golden hour’ for intervention is cited as a goal. Similarly, the quicker a rescue scene can be cleared, the less the economic impact in terms of lost productivity and community disruption.
ν Hazmat, Counter-Terrorism, Earthquake and Structural Collapse – all these incidents benefit from early intervention but the overriding consideration is careful scene assessment and stabilisation to ensure safe operations. Establishing good command and control in a timely manner is key to a good outcome.
ν Storm, Flood and Tsunami – apart from swift-water rescue, similar comments to the above point apply here but the focus is even more aligned to early intelligence collection to support planning for major operations.
The key observation from the range of emergencies dealt with is that apart from fire as a life-hazard where response is characterised as ‘immediately urgent’, a positive outcome is achievable from a response characterised by ‘as soon as reasonably practicable’. This translates into acceptable longer response times allowing for larger geographical catchments drawing on larger populations to be serviced by permanently staffed crews. The full-time crews are better placed to undertake the prevention and preparation work necessary to meet life-safety goals, thereby reducing this burden from volunteers. In this way, the extended low-density regional communities get benefits similar to metropolitan communities. There is greater equity in service delivery.
Meeting the community need
While service equity is an admirable goal, the service offering from permanent crews still needs to recognise and reflect the differences between regional and metropolitan areas. Permanent crews would not operate exclusively but augment and support the existing part-time and volunteer arrangements and consequently can be smaller and more flexible drawing as they can on a broader supply of labour. This is the optimal investment pathway that serves not just an improvement in service equity but also addresses the climate change challenge.
The response to recent floods that seriously affected communities in northern NSW has been the subject of intense public scrutiny. The recent report of the NSW Legislative Council Response to major flooding across New South Wales in 2022 highlights the difficulties emergency services will face into the future. To quote from the Chair’s foreword: ‘Put simply, the community was forced to save themselves; neighbour saving neighbour.’
This encapsulates the enormity of the challenge in scaling up response to meet an evolving disaster. A key first step in dealing with this is the establishment of integrated command and control as early as possible. This is precisely what a regional network of permanent firefighting capability can deliver.
Everyday emergency response and community-based prevention activities morphs into early forward command and intelligence gathering that provides a focal point for communities as they spontaneously volunteer and allows central authority to muster the necessary broader resources for the ongoing campaign.
Conclusion
The earlier onset of flashover in fires undermines the rationale for how fire services have historically evolved. Recognising this creates an opportunity for addressing the emerging threat posed by climate change. Resourcing will always be challenging but shifting the emphasis of concentrating full-time on-duty firefighting staff from large urban areas to a broader geographical spread where they work in support of local crews and communities allows for the earlier establishment of good command and control as well as direct service delivery in an all-hazards context.
The twin needs of equitable service delivery for extended low-density communities combined with the need for reliable command and control early as part of an evolving disaster underpins the economic case for a regional network, albeit with larger geographical catchments, of small, flexible full-time crews.
For more information, email Greg.Buckley@fire.nsw.gov.au
About the Author
Greg Buckley is a Chief Superintendent with Fire and Rescue NSW where he has served for 39 years across many roles. He is currently the Area Commander for southern NSW.
