Resources diverted

– Melissa Meehan
URGENT pressure from other serious blazes meant that Bunyip firefighting resources had to be diverted from the local area at the height of the Black Saturday bushfires.
The Bushfire Royal Commission heard last week that a number of fires burning in Region 8 meant Operations Manager Trevor Owen’s job became similar to triage, judging the potential danger of each fire.
“It was all at the same time,” he said.
“We had a major fire at Kirkham Road off Eastlink that was heading towards Visy Board and to VicNet Gas which supplied gas to Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.
“Shortly after that there was the Harkaway fire which was following a similar trend to Ash Wednesday, then shortly after that we had the Lynbrook fire which had come across the South Gippsland Highway and also into Narre Warren South, to the point where we were struggling to resource all the growing events at the same time.”
Mr Owen said he used the operations officers, who worked under him, by rank and deployed them to the different fires to be able to make an assessment with the incident controller to try to release possible resources even though the fire may have not been extinguished or contained.
“We were trying to apply a risk assessment based on good judgement and common sense,” he said.
Another example of a decision he made was deferring a Region 15 strike team from Ballarat on its way to Bunyip, to go straight to Lynbrook instead.
“It was a lucky choice in the sense that they had actually rung up at the time to find out where the staging area they had to be deployed to for the Bunyip Ridge fire was,” he said.
“We then indicated there was a higher priority to protect property in Narre Warren South or the Lynbrook area because we had no further resources left at our disposal.”
He said while Harkaway, Lynbrook and some other fires were not level three incidents, they were treated as if they were.
“All of the fires that were in the afternoon under strong northerly wind conditions, high temperatures and very low humidity had the potential,” he said.
“The likelihood of fire and something growing very rapidly was very real.”