Expect a bushfire warning and you can expect disaster

A system meeting these requirements will be expensive to set up and maintain. It will also steadily degrade if a few years go by with no major fires.

It will be the height of over-confidence to create an expectation in fire-prone communities that they will always receive timely warnings of imminent bushfires. The system will probably work under relatively mild weather and low fuel conditions. But the opposite will always be more likely when a killer bushfire is running. Then people will receive no warning, or warnings will be too late to enable appropriate actions.

There is another very real problem. This is when warnings are issued but are not followed by a fire. In the coming fire season or two we can expect that there will be a (wholly understandable) temptation to overdo the warnings. Fire officers with trigger fingers will not want to face a Coronial Court for failing to push the button. But if fires do not follow warnings, the result will be the “crying wolf syndrome” where people become blasé, and then do not react when there really is a fire.

In my view the first priority for fire authorities should be to optimise the bushfire resilience of towns and communities - in particular reducing areas of heavy fuel within and adjoining residential areas, making houses and road verges safer, setting up local community refuge areas and maintaining a program of regular mild burning in hinterland forests. Second, they should be telling people that it is quite likely they will NOT be warned and that they must themselves take responsibility for finding out what is going on and having a sensible plan of action, including evacuation to a safe place well before a situation becomes remotely dangerous. In my view both of these actions will have greater value than spending millions of dollars on “technological-fix” bushfire warning systems.

The fundamental message that our governments should be putting out is this: if you live in, or close to the Australian bush, you should expect to get a bushfire on a hot windy day in summer ... and be prepared for it. To rely on a government warning system is to rely on something that is inherently unreliable.

There is a final factor. As that wise anthropologist George Silberbauer has pointed out: we already have a system in which the Bureau of Meteorology puts out twice-daily fire danger forecasts and these are published on the net and broadcast on the news. Most country roads have Fire Danger warning signs. The problem is, few people understand fire danger, and the system is unduly complicated with six, and soon to be seven, categories. It is possible that if we had a more simple way of expressing the fire danger index, which is a warning in itself, and we ensured it was more effectively transmitted and better understood by the whole community, the new technological gizmos would not be needed.