Victorian Bushfires Research Articles

The Black Saturday bushfire disaster: found poetry for arts-based knowledge translation in disaster risk and climate change communication

ABSTRACT This research uses the arts-based research method of found poetry, the creation of poem-like prose from existing text, to share the lived experience of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfire disaster in Australia which killed 173 people. After outlining the processes, this paper applies found poetry to an existing text: Peg Fraser’s book, Black Saturday. Five found poems are shared, each conveying a different element of the disaster experience: “Armageddon,” “Go – GET OUT,” “Bushfire Chook,” “Resisting the Poetry Tree,” and “Lucky”. Compared to normal prose, there is an authentic and vulnerable vibrancy to the language of these found poems, which offer unexpected visceral insight into the bushfire experience – the fear, the heat, the confusion, the anger, and the loss. Poetry, which resonates and draws people in emotionally, has significant potential as arts-based knowledge translation in disaster risk and climate change communication.

Individual and community experiences of posttraumatic growth after disaster: 10 years after the Australian Black Saturday bushfires.

To understand longer-term posttraumatic growth (PTG) and how this is associated with individual and community bushfire experiences. Survey data (n = 391) from the Beyond Bushfires and the 10-year Beyond Bushfires studies were analyzed. Multilevel modeling examined relationships between basic individual demographics, bushfire exposure, and community-level variables at 3-4 years after the fires, and PTG at 10 years using the short form of the PTG Inventory. Ten years after these Australian bushfires, being female, experiencing higher degrees of property loss, and stronger individual sense of community were the factors associated with PTG. Approximately 12% of the variance observed in PTG scores was attributable to differences in PTG across communities. Individuals from medium and high bushfire-affected communities reported significantly higher PTG relative to those in low bushfire-affected communities. While there was evidence of community differences in PTG, and individuals' own sense of community was positively and significantly associated with increased PTG, community-level cohesion scores were not found to be significantly related to PTG (although the trend was in the expected direction). PTG is evident in longer-term disaster recovery. While PTG appears to vary across communities, the findings suggest that it is an individual's own sense of community (rather than community-level cohesion) that is most closely related to this longer-term growth following a bushfire event. While PTG is currently understood as an outcome of individual-level perceptions, community-level experiences shape the potential for positive transformations to occur after disasters and warrant further investigation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Building resilience and sustainable HRM in the visitor economy: An uneasy relationship

This paper draws on small and medium enterprises' (SMEs') experiences of the 2019/2020 Victorian (Australia) bushfires and COVID-19 to explore organizations' capacity to achieve Sustainable Human Resource Management (S-HRM) and organizational resilience outcomes within crisis contexts. The study adopts a qualitative research design. Virtual, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 33 stakeholders across two, contextually different tourism destinations (Bright and Echuca-Moama located in Victoria, Australia). Thematic analysis was undertaken. Findings present a mixed picture. Macro, meso and micro-level factors such as business type, location and workforce management; owner-managers’ skill sets and networks; prior experience of crises; individual wellbeing; government crisis management processes; and housing shortages were found to influence SMEs' sustainability and resilience outcomes. Tensions faced by SMEs, such as dilemmas between financial versus social sustainability, and employee versus business owner wellbeing, were revealed. Inspired by the UN's Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 8), the paper brings together literature from sustainable HRM and resilience to discuss how SMEs in the tourism and hospitality sector can nurture social outcomes and organizational resilience. This is a timely conversation given COVID-induced workplace disruptions, and the likelihood of future shocks.

Anger Following the Victorian Black Saturday Bushfires: Implications for Postdisaster Service Provision

ABSTRACT Anger is a well-recognised but little understood emotion in postdisaster contexts. For service providers working in recovery environments, it is critical to understand anger to ensure effective supports and interventions are mobilised. This article describes findings from a study conducted four years after the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday bushfires. Thirty-eight community and service-provider participants were interviewed as individuals, dyads, or within focus groups about their own and others’ experiences of anger. Postdisaster anger was described as more immediate, intense, and frequent than predisaster, and seen by participants as destructive, productive, and justified. Experiences and understandings differed by gender, and related to aggression, violence, and family violence. Service provision was a key trigger for anger, with leadership styles, community expectations, and community members’ level of control over decision making being factors that shaped experience. Based on these findings, five proposed principles for anger-sensitive practice in disaster contexts, along with wider considerations for understanding anger, are provided. IMPLICATIONS This article provides unique understandings of the experience of anger following disaster, which are useful for social workers, community members and leaders, and other service providers. Research findings about anger experiences and outcomes postdisaster are synthesised into proposed principles for practice with disaster-impacted communities (that can potentially build capability prior to disasters).

Rural Fires—Causes of Human Losses in the 2017 Fires in Portugal

Extreme wildfires are increasingly rising to intense and uncontrolled fires, with dimension and destructive potentials that are greater than what has been seen and dealt with. The hazards posed by these fires increase significantly when they approach the wild–urban interface, with relevant environmental and socio-economic consequences. The 2009 Victorian bushfires and the 2017 Portugal wildfires are powerful reminders, and they have demonstrated the need to better understand why mitigation plans have failed to protect the community in these events and to improve community resilience. The year 2017 is a milestone in the history of wildfires in Portugal, not only because of the vast burned area but also due to the high number of fatalities. The two occurrences were at different times (June and October) but were geographically close (region of centre of Portugal). A total of 117 deaths occurred in both events and 92% of the victims were in wild–urban interface areas. This paper analyses and discusses the characteristics and causes of death of the victims of these two events: age, place of death, distance from place of death to place of residence and last-minute choices to aim to understand the actions that people took in the face of the approaching fire, which led to their death. In both cases, most people died fleeing the fire without any information from the competent authorities. In the end, it is possible to identify risk factors that lead to the death of civilians due to wildfires, such as the increase in demand for rurality by young people from big cities with no previous contact with wildfires; on the other hand, there is the ageing of the population residing in forest areas, who were previously physically and structurally prepared to deal with fires and are currently no longer able to.

Creating Fire-Adapted Communities Through Recovery: Case Studies from the United States and Australia

Wildfires can be devastating for social and ecological systems, but the recovery period after wildfire presents opportunities to reduce future risk through adaptation. We use a collective case study approach to systematically compare social and ecological recovery following four major fire events in Australia and the United States: the 1998 wildfires in northeastern Florida; the 2003 Cedar fire in southern California; the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, southeastern Australia; and the 2011 Bastrop fires in Texas. Fires spurred similar policy changes, with an emphasis on education, land use planning, suppression/emergency response, and vegetation management. However, there was little information available in peer-reviewed literature about social recovery, ecological recovery was mostly studied short term, and feedbacks between social and ecological outcomes went largely unconsidered. Strategic and holistic approaches to wildfire recovery that consider linkages within and between social–ecological systems will be increasingly critical to determine if recovery leads to adaptation or recreates vulnerability.

Bushfire‐Induced Water Balance Changes Detected by a Modified Paired Catchment Method

AbstractWhile bushfires are often regarded as a vital trigger that alters the partitioning of hydrological fluxes, their role in water balance changes remains poorly quantified, especially in regions where the impacts of frequent bushfires and climate variability overlap. Here, we estimated the fire‐induced water balance changes based on a modified paired catchment method that considers the partial effect of annual precipitation differences. In the application for eight forested catchments impacted by the 2009 Victorian Bushfires with multiple burned areas (12%–89%), we found that evapotranspiration declined by 33 ± 20 mm yr−1 (mean ± standard deviation) and streamflow increased by 68 ± 32 mm yr−1 during the post‐fire decade. For the interannual changes within this decade, the decline in evapotranspiration due to fires gradually recovered after the first year since bushfires, while the increase in streamflow mostly peaked in the second or third year and diminished in subsequent years. We surmised that such asynchronous responses of the two fluxes to bushfires occurred with the initial increase and the later decrease in terrestrial water storage. Averaged for the post‐fire decade, there seems to be an overall decline in terrestrial water storage for burned catchments relative to unburned catchments.

Climate change can be seen through a disaster medicine lens.

Climate change can be seen through a disaster medicine lens.

An integrated multi-objective model for disaster waste clean-up systems optimization

Post-disaster waste clean-up systems are complex and expensive operations that need to consider multiple stakeholders with different objectives. We propose a mixed-integer programming model that models the waste clean-up operations as a two-echelon system. The model decides on the location of waste processing facilities, the use of demolition resources, and the number and type of vehicles to be assigned to each echelon at each time slot of the planning horizon. The objectives considered in the model include minimizing environmental impacts, economic costs, and total time spent on the operations. Numerical results obtained on a case study based on the '2009 Victoria Black Saturday Bush-fires' case and on synthetically generated instances are used to obtain Pareto frontiers. The research concludes that the three objectives considered are indeed conflictive, and the explicit consideration of each goal can help decision-makers find the best trade-off solutions.

Air pollution and health outcomes: Evidence from Black Saturday Bushfires in Australia

This paper presents new evidence of the causal effect of air pollution on Australian health outcomes, using the Black Saturday bushfires (BSB) in 2009 as a natural experiment. This event was one of the largest bushfires in Australian history and emitted approximately four million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. We use data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamic Australia (HILDA) panel and compare the health status of individuals who were living in affected and unaffected regions before and after the event. Using a triple differences procedure, we further examine whether a difference in vulnerability to bushfire smoke exists comparing people living in urban or regional areas. We find that ambient air pollution had significant negative effects on health and that the magnitudes were actually larger for individuals residing in urban areas.

Material vulnerabilities and interspecies relationalities: a critical appraisal of the legal status of animals in disasters

ABSTRACT As liminal, exigent moments in time, disasters cast light on the significance of animals’ relationships with humans. Through their materialisation, human–animal relations are revealed as taking myriad forms: loyal, neglectful, salutary, harmful, benevolent, deleterious. This article examines how a pervasive failure by the Western legal imaginary to acknowledge and account for the relational aspects of animals’ lives amplifies their susceptibility to harm during disasters. To this end, the article analyses two major dimensions of animals’ legal status: their status as property; and statutory provisions governing animal welfare and wildlife habitat. It consults three temporally and geographically disparate disasters which affected jurisdictions within the Western legal tradition, namely Hurricane Katrina, the Victorian Black Saturday Bushfires and New Zealand’s Canterbury Earthquakes, to scrutinise how each dimension of animals’ legal status aggravates their vulnerability to the adverse effects of hazards. Drawing from critical literatures which foreground and fault Western law’s inattention to the nonhuman material world, the article attributes this condition to an ingrained feature of animals’ legal status: that it overlooks the determinative role played by animals’ relationships with humans in securing or compromising their wellbeing and survival during disasters.

Remote Sensing and Meteorological Data Fusion in Predicting Bushfire Severity: A Case Study from Victoria, Australia

The extent and severity of bushfires in a landscape are largely governed by meteorological conditions. An accurate understanding of the interactions of meteorological variables and fire behaviour in the landscape is very complex, yet possible. In exploring such understanding, we used 2693 high-confidence active fire points recorded by a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor for nine different bushfires that occurred in Victoria between 1 January 2009 and 31 March 2009. These fires include the Black Saturday Bushfires of 7 February 2009, one of the worst bushfires in Australian history. For each fire point, 62 different meteorological parameters of bushfire time were extracted from Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia (BARRA) data. These remote sensing and meteorological datasets were fused and further processed in assessing their relative importance using four different tree-based ensemble machine learning models, namely, Random Forest (RF), Fuzzy Forest (FF), Boosted Regression Tree (BRT), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). Google Earth Engine (GEE) and Landsat images were used in deriving the response variable–Relative Difference Normalised Burn Ratio (RdNBR), which was selected by comparing its performance against Difference Normalised Burn Ratio (dNBR). Our findings demonstrate that the FF algorithm utilising the Weighted Gene Coexpression Network Analysis (WGCNA) method has the best predictive performance of 96.50%, assessed against 10-fold cross-validation. The result shows that the relative influence of the variables on bushfire severity is in the following order: (1) soil moisture, (2) soil temperature, (3) air pressure, (4) air temperature, (5) vertical wind, and (6) relative humidity. This highlights the importance of soil meteorology in bushfire severity analysis, often excluded in bushfire severity research. Further, this study provides a scientific basis for choosing a subset of meteorological variables for bushfire severity prediction depending on their relative importance. The optimal subset of high-ranked variables is extremely useful in constructing simplified and computationally efficient surrogate models, which can be particularly useful for the rapid assessment of bushfire severity for operational bushfire management and effective mitigation efforts.

Creating Awareness Regarding Forensic Odontology Among Non-Forensic Persons for Successful Dental Identifications

Visual Identification by next of kin is the most common method of identifying unknown bodies in India. However, this technique is unscientific and unreliable, especially if the remains recovered are decomposing, skeletonized, charred, mutilated, saponified. Primary identifiers recommended by higher authorities for scientific identification of unknown bodies include comparison of fingerprints, DNA, odontology or unique medical records such as implants. Forensic Odontology has played a major role in identifying victims of mass disasters around the world, and few examples of successful application of dental data in DVI situations include the South Asian Tsunami, 2004, Black Saturday bushfires, 2009, Australia, Christchurch earthquake, 2011, etc. However, the application of forensic odontology for positive identifications is extremely limited. A major reason for this is the unavailability and inaccessibility to quality dental records and ante mortem data. To improve the collection of ante mortem data, it is urgent that we create awareness among local on-ground investigating agencies, and stakeholders. For this purpose, an awareness campaign iDENTifyme from the University of Turin, Italy was launched in India in local languages, and has since successfully assisted in collection of ante mortem data for positive identification.

Fire ecology for the 21st century: Conserving biodiversity in the age of megafire

Fire ecology for the 21st century: Conserving biodiversity in the age of megafire

Insurance, fire and the peri-urban: perceptions of changing communities in Melbourne’s rural-urban interface

ABSTRACT Across the world, cities are growing, blurring lines between urban and rural. In Australia, peri-urban areas are undergoing demographic shifts and extensive development. In the literature, these shifts are characterised by differences in the risk perceptions and hazard experiences between established and incoming residents. In this paper, we illustrate how some of these differences are perceived by focusing on house and contents insurance in the bushfire-prone City of Whittlesea on the fringes of Greater Melbourne. This location captures the complex relationship between growing population and high bushfire risk, and is the site of the country’s deadliest bushfire event, Black Saturday, in 2009. Through in-depth interviews, we observe that residents perceive insurance as playing a role in peri-urban change. Specifically, underinsurance is understood to be a challenge faced by many impacted by the Black Saturday fires, and contributes to feelings of uncertainty regarding the capacities of changing communities to work together to prepare for and recover from future fires. Our focus on insurance is informed by the need to better understand the social qualities of this dimension of disaster preparedness and recovery, and how perceptions of insurance amid peri-urban change may help produce social patterns and trends.

Gendered aspects of long-term disaster resilience in Victoria, Australia

Research conducted in 2018 documented the disaster experiences of 56 women and men in Australia aged between 18 and 93 years. This paper draws out the gendered factors that affected their resilience, and in so doing, begins to address the dearth of research related to gendered aspects of long-term disaster resilience. It is unique in capturing the voices of survivors who spoke of events 9 years after the 2009 Black Saturday fires and of earlier fires and floods in Victoria more than 50 years ago, including the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires. Over decades, gendered expectations of men and women significantly hindered resilience. Men spoke of the long-term cost to them of demands to ‘be strong’ in the worst of disasters and reasons they were reluctant to seek help afterwards. Women spoke of their contributions holding a lesser value and of discrimination. Discussions of violence against women and children after disaster, and suicide ideation in anticipation of future disasters offered critical insights. Protective factors identified by informants were not wholly intrinsic to their character but were also physical, such as essential resources provided in the immediate aftermath, and psychological and community support offered in the long-term. Factors that helped resilience departed from the ‘masculine’ model of coping post-disaster by moving away from a refusal to admit trauma and suffering, to community-wide resilience bolstered by widespread emotional, social and psychological support. Genuine community planning for disasters before they strike builds trust and offers insights for emergency management planners.

Enacting safety: Firefighter sensemaking of entrapment in an Australian bushfire context

How do firefighting teams achieve safety when entrapped by flame? My case analysis of firefighting crews during the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009 in Victoria, Australia, examines the ways that teams can negotiate and renegotiate safety when they encounter danger, through a social process of sensemaking and sensegiving. This study has important implications for fire crews that work in dangerous circumstances who have hitherto been found to struggle to negotiate safety when entrapped by flame in bushfire events.

Evaluating wildfire exposure: Using wellbeing data to estimate and value the impacts of wildfire

This paper estimates the wellbeing effects of the 2009 Black Saturday Bushfires, the deadliest wildfire event in Australia’s known history. Using subjective wellbeing data from a nationally representative longitudinal study and adopting an individual fixed-effects approach, our results identify a significant reduction in life satisfaction for individuals residing in close proximity of the wildfires. The negative wellbeing effect is valued at A$52,300. This corresponds to 80% of the average annual income of a full-time employed adult in the state of Victoria. The satisfaction domain most negatively affected is how safe the person feels, and the group most affected are people with low social support. A delayed adverse mental health effect is also identified.

Decision support for wildfire asset protection: A two-stage stochastic programming approach

During uncontrollable wildfires, decision-makers dispatch vehicles for tasks aimed at reducing the hazard to key assets. The decision-making process is complicated by the need for vehicle capabilities to match asset requirements within time windows determined by the progression of the fire. This is often further complicated by a wind change that is expected but with uncertainty in the timing. This paper aims to provide a decision support approach for determining plans for the deployment of resources under various scenarios. To this end, we solve the Asset Protection Problem (APP) in the context of Australia’s Black Saturday bushfires by developing a two-stage stochastic model. In this problem, we consider uncertainties in the timing of a change in wind velocity in defining various scenarios. We present a dynamic rerouting model and an Adaptive Large Neighbourhood Search (ALNS) algorithm to solve the model in a time efficient manner for decision-makers. A new set of instances were generated using realistic parameters. Thereafter, we evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches through extensive computational experiments. We solve both the two-stage stochastic program and the more limited dynamic rerouting model exactly for small instances. We observe that the restrictions of the dynamic rerouting model yields solutions within a few percent of the two-stage stochastic program. Moreover, the ALNS solution is a good approximation to its exact equivalent but with faster solution times. After further tests, it became apparent that with larger asset numbers the ALNS is the more practical method for operational purposes.

A Combined Approach of Remote Sensing, GIS, and Social Media to Create and Disseminate Bushfire Warning Contents to Rural Australia

Bushfires are an integral part of the forest regeneration cycle in Australia. However, from the perspective of a natural disaster, the impact of bushfires on human settlements and the environment is massive. In Australia, bushfires are the most disastrous natural hazards. According to the records of the Parliament of Australia, the recent catastrophic bushfires in NSW and Victoria burnt out over 10 million hectares of land, a figure more significant than any previous bushfire damage on record. After the deadly 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, which killed 173 people in Victoria, public attention to bushfires reached a new peak. Due to the disastrous consequences of bushfires, scientists have explored various methods to mitigate or even avoid bushfire damage, including the use of bushfire alerts. The present study adds satellite imagery and GIS-based semi-real-time bushfire contents to various bushfire warnings issued by government authorities. The new product will disseminate graphical bushfire contents to rural Australians through social media, using Google Maps. This low-cost Media GIS content can be delivered through highly popular smartphone networks in Australia through social media (Facebook and Twitter). We expect its success to encourage people to participate in disaster mitigation efforts as contributors in a participatory GIS network. This paper presents a case study to demonstrate the production process and the quality of media GIS content and further discusses the potential of using social media through the mobile network of Australia while paying attention to mobile blackspots. Media GIS content has the potential to link with the public information systems of local fire management services, disseminate contents through a mobile app, and develop into a fully automated media GIS content system to expand the service beyond bushfires.