Bulletin

Issue: October 2005

News

Safety on the fire front

La Trobe University, as part of its role in the national Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, will investigate safety in fireground decision-making during the forthcoming fire season.

Another season of front-line research:
Dr Omodei, centre, with the La Trobe
University interview team.

Last summer researchers interviewed 33 fire-fighters, ranging from crew leaders to incident controllers, after they had fought large-scale wildfires and prescribed fires in NSW and Victoria.

While this pilot stage of the seven-year project can not be expected to produce reliable findings, project leader, Dr Mary Omodei, a senior lecturer in psychology, says it identified some valuable early trends. For example, while volunteer and career fire-fighters regularly make impressive decisions, often under quite difficult circumstances, she says at times they lacked faith in information provided by people they did not know personally.

'This lack of trust was reported to occur both up and down the command chain, with a tendency to go outside of the formal command chain to obtain information from trusted sources.'

She says other issues that need further investigation to help boost the quality of decision making by fire-fighters include possible problems with changeover briefings, mental overload, fatigue and dehydration, and morale maintenance due to conflicting 'hurry and wait' aspects of the job.

'Another thing we noted in early research was a tendency at times to undue optimism - for example, overestimating the speed with which fire suppression activities can be conducted while under-estimating fire spread rate.'

Hot Scholarships

Two Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre PhD Scholarships will be offered in the School of Psychology next year.

'These are great opportunities for honours graduates from a range of disciplines,' says Dr Omodei.

'The first involves research to improve fire fighter safety at bushfires, the second to help fire agencies maintain volunteer fire fighter numbers.'

Dr Jim McLennan, who manages the project looking at maintaining volunteer numbers, says: 'We are surveying communities, seeking information from employers of volunteers, and looking at why volunteers leave.'