What fighting a bushfire taught me about protecting people and collections.

This is a hand crafted, AI free article.

Black Summer

The Summer of 2019-20 was a devastating time for Australia. Bushfires across the country claimed the lives of thirty-three people and destroyed more than three thousand homes. From where we are now the Black Summer might now be obscured behind the COVID eclipse, but it changed the course of thousands of people’s lives.

During Black Summer I was working at the National Portrait Gallery, responsible for risk, emergency management, security and safety. I drafted and implemented the NPG’s Bushfire Plan including how we responded to the 33 days of the worst air quality in the world, with hazardous smoke threatening the collection and the health of staff and visitors. With the effectiveness of the Portrait Gallery's excellent air handling and filtration tested and confirmed, we remained open to visitors as a refuge from the smoke and heat. I was also an RFS volunteer and a rural landholder living on a 500 acre land for wildlife property in the Clear Range upper Murrumbidgee area. 95% of my place was destroyed by the enormous Clear Range fire, ignited by the landing light of a Defence helicopter in the Orroral Valley in Namadgi National Park. During the fire I stayed to defend with two mates and successfully saved my house and shed. We saw our neighbour’s house burn down and heard the desperate radio calls of other neighbours begging for RFS assistance that never came. 

I want to share how this experience, this experiential knowledge of an enormous, terrifying emergency, can inform how we effectively prepare for emergencies in the normally serene environment of galleries, museums, libraries and other collecting institutions. 

Fire engulfing Adam’s Land for Wildlife Property

Plan with thoughtful imagination 

Having a property bushfire plan that was outcomes led, had adaptation built in and provided clear and specific roles to each person involved was critical. Developing the plan required imagining the probable impacts and behaviour of the fire, what we’d need and what we could realistically protect. On the day it meant we all knew what we were doing, what to focus on in the context of the whole plan.  The same holds true for cultural institutions. Emergency plans and warden duties work best when they’re simple, clear and aligned with objectives.

That calls for thoughtful imagination to think through, mentally simulate, emergencies, procedures, roles and how they fit together. The Australian Standards, safety and emergency legislation and guidance from peak bodies provide us with a tried and tested framework. Aligning with these benchmarks is the minimum. 

To protect our people, collections, and buildings emergency plans in cultural institutions need to be contextualised for our specific sites and operations. That requires the ability to imagine an array of emergency scenarios in a specific gallery or museum and the actions required to effectively respond to protect life and collections. 

During the chaos of an emergency the cognitive and emotional load we experience is extreme. Time might seem to slow down or speed up. We might become hyperfocused. We don’t really know until we’ve been there. In the chaos of an emergency, a thoughtfully developed and communicated emergency plan frees up precious cognitive capacity. 

The aftermath

Plan to adapt

We are increasingly facing unexpected emergencies due to drivers like climate change and a deteriorating security environment, and we’ve always experienced unexpected challenges during emergencies. We can’t plan for everything, but we can plan to adapt using an objectives focus and communication.

About an hour into our bushfire my friend Stan told me there was a problem. With fire surrounding the house the hose fitting on the pump he was relying on had melted off and he needed a zip tie to lock it back into place. He communicated the message in that very effective order:

1. This is serious.

2. This is the issue.

3. Here’s what I need. 

Whether you’re an incident controller or a landowner trying to save your house, when unexpected issues inevitably crop up you need to talk about them, collaborate and implement a solution or find a workaround. The way we train staff to resolve issues towards objectives and communicate will help us adapt to the unexpected. 

Nature adapts

Emergency response is a human activity

Emergency plans and emergency training exist to support human beings to respond to and recover from an emergency. Wonderfully complex and capable human beings can make connections under pressure to solve problems and adapt, but we can’t be programmed, we need food, water, and rest and we need to integrate our experiences through debriefing.

The raw physical effort required to fight a bushfire, pulling hoses, moving pumps and running to spot fires while breathing noxious smoke in unbearable temperatures is incredible. A few hours in I was completely spent, exhausted, and I realised I needed to eat some food and drink some water. Simple, but as you might imagine, food and drinks were not at the top of the priorities list in our preparations, but they should have been up there. Looking after the human physical and psychosocial elements of emergency planning and response is key. 

Incident Management and Business Continuity Teams operate under pressure and in disrupted environments. During natural disasters and other widespread disruptions normal services are unavailable. In Canberra we’ve seen police emergency services without capacity to respond to triple-0 calls during protests, hail storms and bushfires. Our plans should anticipate disruptions to emergency services response, disruptions to utilities like power and water supply, and we should plan for how we keep our teams going when food delivery services go dark or physical access to the site isn’t possible.

Great emergency planning does the thinking before the crisis, it’s human focussed and it’s an operational enabler. If that’s what you need, Culture Collab is here to deliver. 

A burnt leaf that fell from the sky and a National Emergency Medal awarded by the Governor General