Abstract
Australia's bushfire seasons are expected to become longer and more severe due to the effects of climate change and an increasing population living in rural-urban fringes. Social and economic vulnerability to extreme natural hazards means that Australia’s emergency services sector plays a significant role in community safety and wellbeing. Therefore, it is important that the sector continually improves. Australia has a long history of conducting external reviews into significant bushfires. While these reviews receive good support and seek to identify relevant lessons, barriers remain that prevent these lessons from being effectively learnt. It is possible that some of these barriers exist because the stratum of work impedes the capture, codifying and adjustments to systems. This research investigated the premise that lessons learnt in the Australian emergency services sector occurs on a stratum, with different types of lessons learnt at different levels of work. Four significant independent bushfire reviews were analysed to evaluate whether specific lessons could be aligned to the stratum of work. Findings were that not all lessons apply to all levels of organisations. This supports the premise that lessons are learnt on a vertical organisational stratum; for example, some lessons were operational, others were tactical and some were strategic. It was determined that a lack of understanding of the barriers within an organisations stratum could impede the effectiveness of lessons being learnt.
Highlights
Australia’s bushfire seasons are lasting longer and getting more severe
This study investigated lessons identified within the bushfirethreat environment across 4 external reviews of significant bushfires that occurred in Australia between 1983 and 2018
It was difficult to assess whether a 2011 review into prescribed bushfires getting out of control in Western Australia should have learnt from a 1983 review into bushfires in Victoria
Summary
Australia’s bushfire seasons are lasting longer and getting more severe. More Australians are living in rural-urban fringe areas and Australia’s climate has changed with increasing temperatures (CSIRO & Bureau of Meteorology 2018). This research identified common themes across the post-event reviews, these themes were not aligned to specific organisational strata and failed to consider Boin and t'Hart's (2010) views about the challenges for learning lessons at different levels in emergency services organisations. This limitation indicates that a gap in the literature exists. Stratified Systems Theory is a robust means of evaluating organisations and allows for comparisons between different organisations (Craddock 2009) This theory has direct relevance to the lessons-learnt process in the emergency services sector as disasters usually involve a multi-agency response. Jaques (2016) highlights how each organisation’s stratum aligns with other orgaisation’s strata; where indiviuals from one stratum may have responsibility for the activities of members of another organisational stratum, but with no line management authority
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