5/8/14 Gippsland - The RCC - Hazelwood Mine Fire - Walhalla

Our hotel in Wahalla

NOTE:  This post will be completed later as its late in the evening so check back. I have posted a portion of the day.

We spent a very long Thursday covering a lot of territory.  I have to admit to much of it being a bit of a blur as we struggle to absorb so much information, so many places and so many new faces and acronyms!

Walhalla

We began our day at breakfast in the historic mining town of Walhalla where we had spent the night.  We heard from Steph Carr about the Fire Learning Network who role is to have strategic conversations with the public about fire. Communities approach the Network to ask for help is starting the discussion in their community, to asses what people already know from experience and build more knowledge about fire.  Steph emphasizes that she's not "selling" anything, nor is she defending the Department, but rather providing a neutral facilitator to help educate and get discussion going. She says there is no agenda, or if there is its set by the participants and is designed to create space where trust can be built.  It's an investment in relationships, she says, and can take a long time but has proven to be worth it. Allowing the community to talk about what THEY want to talk about, makes it easier for the agency to come back later to talk about what THEY need to talk about.

Walhalla is a beautiful town with a history based on the gold rush.  I won't go into the details but it was very pretty.  Lots of interesting old architecture and the owner of the hotel was happy to give us a colorful history of the town and the hotel.

Valley in Gippsland under which lies 300 years of
coal to power Melbourne

We drove to a district called Gippsland which provides much of the power for Melbourne.  The entire valley as far as you can see has power plants, run on coal, and it was here that the recent Hazelwood Coal Mine fire happened.  The fire spread from a bushfire into an open coal seam and created a complicated incident in which the fire, other agencies like public health and messaging where complex and challenging.

Getting a briefing from Peter West about how they
conduct risk assessments in places like Gippsland.

An enormous open pit coal mine

While overlooking the valley, we heard from Peter West, the leader of the East Central Bushfire Risk Landscape Team, talk about how they assess and analyze risk.  Since the risks came from many areas, not all similar (fire, coal mines, endangered habitat), they needed to find a way to compare apples and apples.  First, they group assets and assume if the primary assets are being protected, the secondary assets are being protected simply due to proximity.  So they try to find one treatment, perhaps a fuels burning project that will protect a number of assets instead of just one by pulling back and thinking at a larger scale.  They use a graph that looks at the same 4 measures for each risk: 1) define the asset geographically, 2) determine a specific risk vulnerability threshold ( like at how many feet and at what temperature will a hour burn? Or at what temperature is an ecological system destroyed),  3) Use worst case scenarios to establish a baseline and 4) apply the mitigation and determine residual risk. They have found this works as a common measure for many dissimilar things.

The Regional Control Center 

We also spent some time at the regional control center, like a city or regional EOC, and had an interesting discussion about the complications of the Coal Mine Fire.  Apparently, the big problem was communication between agencies in terms of coordinating messages. They were not adequately prepared to deal with both the fire AND the public health issues that came from the coal smoke and we had some discussion about how a JIC could help with that.  Currently, they do not use JICs and rely on agency reps to take care of that as well as be the agency liaisons.

I think we went somewhere else after that but I cannot remember as things are becoming a blur! An amazing amount of information and some really good ideas going both ways I think.