How decisions are made to predict and control fires
While there’s a lot of research world-wide into fire behaviour – none of it has yet developed sufficiently robust fire danger rating scales that could have covered the conditions predicted for Victoria’s recent bush fire disaster.
This meant urgent decisions had to be made under extreme uncertainty, says La Trobe University psychologist and fire research specialist, Dr Mary Omodei.
Dr Omodei was a member of a group of researchers assembled by the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) in the wake of the February bush fires to look at key issues arising from the fires. La Trobe is a member of the Centre.
The purpose of the research is to provide Australian fire and land management agencies with an independent analysis of the factors surrounding the fires. This knowledge will be shared across Australia and internationally and will assist with the Royal Commission and other investigations and inquiries.
A senior lecturer in psychology, Dr Omodei is leader of the University’s social sciences projects in the Bushfire CRC. She and her colleagues study how decisions are made in the attempt to predict and to control fires.
‘Firefighters in both incident control centres and on the fireground would have had to make these decisions in the face of fire and weather conditions outside their knowledge and experience,’ she says.
‘Those charged with making predictions and decisions concerning the Victorian fires faced enormous challenges. Previous research suggests that human decision-making ability deteriorates in rapidly changing and relatively unpredictable fire situations.
‘While it remains unclear what factors cause such a decline in decision-making ability, our research findings suggest these range from inherent limitations of cognitive processing abilities — limitations that are further aggravated by cognitive physiological and psychological stress — to communication and challenges faced by teams of people having to exercise decision making control over such situations.
‘The weather situation predicted for the seventh of February and the fire situation that actually occurred would have placed decision makers in situations which exceeded the limits of human decision making abilities on many levels.’
So could technology be used to help? Yes, says Dr Omodei who, with La Trobe computer scientists, a few years ago helped develop a forest fire fighting simulator for research and training to assist Australia’s fire fighters make decisions in the complexity of real-world fire behaviour.
Another aspect of fire research by the La Trobe psychology group deals with understanding individual, community, and demographic factors which impact on recruiting and retaining volunteer fire fighters, another important issue that arose following the recent fires in Victoria and NSW.