Aus­tralian bush­fire disaster
The worst nat­ur­al dis­as­ter in Australia’s post-Euro­pean set­tle­ment his­to­ry occurred on 7 Feb­ru­ary 2009, a day now known as Black Saturday.
On that day there were record high tem­per­a­tures, sin­gle dig­it humid­i­ty and strong winds up to 150 km/h which came on top of more than 10 years of drought.
A total of 210 deaths with up to 30 peo­ple still miss­ing, more than 2,000 homes destroyed, town­ships wiped out and a count­less loss of farm and native animals.
Some 10 days before Black Sat­ur­day, very seri­ous fires occurred in Gipp­s­land in east­ern Vic­to­ria that forced hun­dreds of peo­ple to flee for safe­ty and 30 homes were destroyed.
The emer­gency com­mu­ni­ca­tions arm of the Aus­tralian Red Cross, RECOM had units quick­ly deployed to main­ly han­dle the reg­is­tra­tions of dis­placed persons.
RECOM, which began 10 years ago as a new con­cept, is entire­ly run by radio ama­teurs who use encrypt­ed dig­i­tal trans­mis­sions on ham bands to send details for the Nation­al Reg­is­tra­tion and Inquiry Ser­vice at the Red Cross head­quar­ters in Melbourne.
A few days after com­plet­ing their duty in Gipp­s­land, the RECOM oper­a­tors were then called out for the Black Sat­ur­day dis­as­ter and served at a num­ber of loca­tions reg­is­ter­ing dis­placed peo­ple and pro­vide logis­tic com­mu­ni­ca­tions for the Red Cross.
The Wire­less Insti­tute Civ­il Emer­gency Net­work (WICEN), a tra­di­tion­al ama­teur radio emer­gency ser­vice was deployed for 28 days in response to the Black Sat­ur­day disaster.
The Vic­to­ri­an Emer­gency Man­age­ment Act sup­port agency WICEN (Vic) had 52 radio ama­teurs involved with their role main­ly being as oper­a­tors of fire ser­vice radio sys­tems. This has been a role for WICEN (Vic) that began at the Bogong fire in 2003.
The fire author­i­ties drew heav­i­ly on the WICEN mem­bers by assign­ing them to radio oper­at­ing duties at Inci­dent Con­trol Cen­tres (ICC) and a Munic­i­pal Emer­gency Coor­di­na­tion Centre.
These were most­ly 12 hour shifts with oper­a­tors expect­ed to work effi­cient­ly and accu­rate­ly despite noise and plen­ty of dis­trac­tions as these nerve cen­tres of dis­as­ter response are hec­tic to say the least. They did extreme­ly well.
The fail­ure of tele­phone ser­vices also saw WICEN pro­vide vital link ser­vices using ama­teur radio between centres.
Anoth­er role of ama­teur radio is to pro­vide third par­ty traf­fic at times of emer­gency, and this hap­pen when WICEN oper­a­tors joined fire­fight­ers at a remote loca­tion that had lim­it­ed fire ser­vice radio cov­er­age and no mobile phone service.
They pro­vid­ed a com­mu­ni­ca­tion link for health and wel­fare rea­sons between fire­fight­ers and their fam­i­lies at home.
This report for IARU R3 News is a sum­ma­ry of what occurred. More detailed reports are to be pub­lished in the WIA jour­nal Ama­teur Radio mag­a­zine and a pre­sen­ta­tion will be made at the Glob­al Ama­teur Radio Emer­gency Con­fer­ence in Tokyo in August.
— Jim Lin­ton VK3PC, Chair­man, IARU Region 3 Dis­as­ter Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Committee.