NSW coroner calls for overhaul of firefighting systems after black summer bushfires
New rules for the use of firefighting aircraft, better alert systems and remodelling risk classifications are among the recommendations from a coronial inquiry into the black summer bushfires in New South Wales.
The state coroner, Teresa O’Sullivan, presented her findings on Wednesday after holding hearings across the state for more than two years to examine 25 deaths and 46 fires across NSW that occurred during the 2019-20 bushfire season.
She made 28 recommendations directed to the commissioners of the NSW Rural Fire Service and police and the chief executive of stateowned infrastructure company Essential Energy.
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Before she handed down her 734page report in the coroner’s court in Lidcombe, O’Sullivan read out the names of the people who had died and acknowledged the “patience and strength” of those who loved them.
She said there were 11,774 fire incidents and 240 consecutive days of burning during the 2019-20 fire season which burnt 5.5m hectares in NSW alone.
O’Sullivan said the fires were “unprecedented in scale and intensity” and had badly affected the “the community’s collective psyche”.
“The sheer scale and ferocity of the fires burning simultaneously meant resources were stretched across the state.
“It is remarkable the loss of life was not even higher.”
O’Sullivan said the need to adapt to the climate crisis “cannot be understated”.
Twenty-three of O’Sullivan’s 28 recommendations were aimed at the RFS, including that the agency review its procedures so that authorised fire investigators examine any breach of fire containment lines.
There should also be better information provided to firefighting pilots and improved training for incident controllers about providing early warnings to communities with limited telecommunications.
O’Sullivan’s recommendations were met with disappointment from Blue Mountains residents who took part in the coronial inquest after being affected by an out-of-control backburn during the black summer.
On 14 December 2019, during catastrophic conditions, the RFS lit a backburn at Mount Wilson in an attempt to contain the huge Gospers Mountain fire which ended up burning an estimated 63,700 hectares in the Grose Valley.
Guardian Australia previously reported locals’ concerns about the coronial inquest, including that the RFS incident controller at the time of the backburn and the state operations controller who approved it were not called to give evidence.
Affected residents on Wednesday repeated their previous calls for the government to set up a compensation scheme and for the RFS to listen to local knowledge.
“Most of us here are members of the RFS. We need the decisions to be made on the fire ground where we are,” Bilpin resident Kooryn Sheaves told journalists outside the coroner’s court.
Sheaves said the group was hoping to take its evidence that had not been heard by the coroner to a parliamentary inquiry.
The Independent Bushfire Group’s Ian Brown urged the RFS to learn from what happened at Mt Wilson.
“Maybe they are but it’s not obvious, because in this [coronial inquiry] various witnesses said there was nothing wrong with what happened, nothing to learn, and they’d do it all again the same,” Brown told reporters.
“So that’s very disturbing.”
Bill Shields, who captained the Bilpin RFS brigade for 30 years, said he was concerned the way the volunteer firefighting agency was managed had changed.
“Part of the reason I finished up as a group officer was I believed that I was going to be asked to do things that I thought were wrong,” Shields told reporters.
Shields said the coroner had done a “remarkable job” but there should be an independent inspector-general of emergency management created to oversee responses to future disasters.
Addressing the media after the coroner handed down her report, the RFS commissioner, Rob Rogers, said the agency was already subject to “plenty of scrutiny”.
He said communications within the agency could “absolutely” be improved but he insisted that firefighting decisions were made locally.
He said the RFS had made improvements to firefighting equipment since the 2019-2020 fire season but the agency would carefully consider the coroner’s recommendations.
There have been several other inquiries into the black summer including one arranged by the then Berejiklian government and a royal commission.