Title: Lessons from the January 2013 NSW bush fires ‘Passing’ the first big test of a new way of operating in an information age

Principle Topic: How emergency management is responding to future challenges

Presenter: Anthony Clark, Group Manager Corporate Communications

This presentation will outline experiences of the January 2013 bush fires in NSW, in which more than 50 homes were destroyed.

This was the first significant bush fire season in NSW since the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria, which resulted in significant changes to information processes.

The presentation will outline community awareness activities undertaken, including recent research on awareness levels, and the development and delivery of the NSW RFS ‘Prepare Act Survive’ campaign which focused on people who had considered making a Bush Fire Survival Plan, but had not actually completed one.

The presentation will also focus on the extensive information and warning activities undertaken in the lead up to the January bush fires, and during a significant number of fires across a large part of NSW.

It is also proposed to detail the results of some of the research which is being conducted by the NSW RFS and Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, which is investigating people’s awareness levels prior to fires such as at Coonabarabran, and their actions during the fire event.

The presentation will also detail the extensive use of social media during the fire emergency, which assisted in not only delivering information to the community, but as a valuable source of information and intelligence for the firefighting effort.

The presentation will conclude with some key learnings from this fire event, and areas of future work.