Emergency services: resilience thinking needed

The Age’s investigative reporter Richard Baker has broken the story in today’s edition that:

The Victorian government and the Country Fire Authority deliberately restricted the operation of a new $108 million emergency communications system in the lead-up to Black Saturday, causing confusion and severe delays in messages sent to firefighters when the disaster hit.

Baker quotes the Department of Justice as saying that the system is a network of pagers used by 29,000 Country Fire Authority (CFA) members and other emergency services personnel to ''instantly receive clear and comprehensive information”.  According to Baker:

Sources from the Department of Justice, which oversaw the introduction of the pagers, claim the government's contract with the company that provided the system said it should operate successfully at 2400 bytes per second - delivering 720,000 characters of text per hour.

But the Government and the CFA chose to restrict the system to its lowest operating level of 512 bytes per second, reducing it to 149,000 characters of text an hour and slower transmission.

The decision was based partly on concern that operating it at its maximum level could result in communications black spots in parts of Victoria...[a problem that]...could have been eliminated by putting up more transmission towers in areas where coverage was weak.... [Also] there was opposition in government and CFA ranks to erecting more transmission towers due to cost.

“Resilience” is a word that is on every policy maker’s lips these days, but there is not much sign of resilience thinking here.  The first question that would have been asked by anyone skilled in the arts of resilience thinking would have been, “How much of a shock could this system withstand and still continue to perform its essential functions?”  Set to its minimum level of capability, the answer would have to be, “Not much”.  This was reportedly demonstrated by operating experience during a severe windstorm in April 2008.  At the peak of the storm, the system began to experience delays and send erroneous messages.

Not much sign of responsive thinking either. Emergency Services Commissioner Bruce Esplin reportedly warned the government of the problems experienced during the windstorm, but no action was taken to rectify the problem.

Not much sign of flexible or forward thinking either. The dogs were barking all week ahead of Black Saturday that Saturday would be a day quite out of the ordinary, but no-one thought to provide for the system to be unlocked to meet its contracted capability of 2400 bytes per second.

To read Richard Baker’s full report see State and CFA crippled alerts here.

To read an article by a world authority on what resilience is, visit the Australia 21 blog site and see Resilience – what is it?, a presentation made by Dr Brian Walker to Australia 21’s recent National Conference on Resilience.

Australia 21 releases Resilience Report

Australia 21 is an independent non-profit research organisation which was established in 2001 to promote the development of new frameworks of understanding about questions which are important to Australia’s future.

An important new report, Brighter Prospects: Enhancing the Resilience of Australia, was launched in Canberra recently by Australia 21’s Patron, Professor Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne. The report is a series of essays, edited by Australia 21 Fellow and leader of our Resilience Project, Dr Steve Cork, an ecologist and futurist who over the last 26 years has been a senior researcher with CSIRO and played a lead role in developing ecological scenarios for the world’s futures in the United Nations Millennium Assessment.

As Dr Brian Walker’s foreword to the Report notes, interest in resilience has emerged in recent years because insights from scientific developments have led to awareness that ecosystems, social systems and linked social-ecological systems (such as agricultural regions, urban complexes or commercial fisheries) behave like complex adaptive systems. That is, they are self-organizing within limits. There are two important outcomes of this systems behaviour:

- It is not possible to tightly control the dynamics of such systems (they shift and change and re-organise if one part is held constant, or ‘optimised’), and, furthermore attempting to do so reduces their ability to absorb shocks. i.e. they need to change and vary in order to remain resilient.

- There are limits to how much such systems can change and still recover. The measure of a system’s resilience is the size of a shock, the amount of change which that system can absorb and still continue to function in much the same kind of way.

This increasing scientific understanding and awareness is occurring at the same time that society’s leaders are becoming increasingly concerned about our ability to cope with a number of looming global and regional scale threats — climate change, pandemics, market collapses, peak oil, ocean acidification, collapsing fisheries, water ‘wars’, terrorist activity, to name some. We cannot prevent or even predict most of them. The priority therefore is to enhance our capacity to cope with whatever shocks occur. In other words, the need is to build resilience.

Australia 21’s work in this area began with a roundtable in Sydney in 2007, which resulted in an Australia 21 working paper, How Resilient is Australia?, by Steve Cork, Brian Walker and Ross Buckley. This collection of papers is a follow-up to that initial effort. Subject to obtaining the necessary funding we plan to continue this line of research and publish a further development of it in book form later in the year.

Australia 21 on Resilience

On Thursday 5 March Professor Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University and Patron of Australia 21 (www.australia21.org.au) will launch Australia 21’s next publication, Brighter Prospects: Enhancing the Resilience of Australia. This collection of essays by leading Australian thinkers, edited by Dr Steve Cork, canvasses the application of resilience thinking in a number of key policy areas including ecosystem resilience, climate change, public health, preparation for pandemics, biosecurity, peak oil, the economy, education, governance and national security.

The document will be available on the Australia 21 website soon after the launch.

If you like what you read, please remember that Australia 21 is a non-profit organisation that is entirely dependent upon grants, donations, in-kind support and generous contributions of time from its directors and researchers to undertake its work in advancing the research agenda on key issues that face Australia, and promoting public debate directed towards the development of robust solutions. As Obama’s approach to funding his election campaign showed so clearly, every little bit helps. Secure online donations can be made by clicking the icon on the Australia 21 home page.

Our thanks to PricewaterhouseCoopers for their generous assistance in staging this launch event.