 Post every year will do incident analysis on specific fires and broadly across all fires across the state. And then we pick out the key learnings from those and they become things for the following year. So if you like a look here and say warnings and advice, well it comes as a no brain and we did warnings and advice really well last year, but there was a couple of things about them. We did lots of them and you could say we had quantity, we didn't have quality as much as possible. And so the general feedback from everybody and probably including us, we got bombarded with warnings, great. See if they did lots of warnings, but how about more timely, more accurate information and also we broaden it out to say multi-lingual people, broader area that we could tap into as well. And if you like that whole warning space since Black Saturday has almost been an iterative or an improved process, every year we get a little bit better so we'll review it. So I suspect warnings and advice will come up every year. In terms of kind of control arrangements, we're still working towards coming together as a different agency so we work to one and the fire service commissioner talks about and I think he will talk about one agency, one force if you like, working together. So what we're trying to do continually is saying same standards, same processes. So when we do go it doesn't matter what badge is on your shirt, we all have some confidence and respect for each other when we come together. The transfer of control. Well what that means is when CFA, if I go to, we do 35 upwards of 40,000 calls a year, most of those what we would call level one jobs, anything from a rubbish bin fire to a house fire to a small grass fire. So we manage that ourselves, just internally if you like. What then happens of course is as they get bigger and bigger and bigger, we transfer control out of our agency into the bigger sector, what we call level threes if you like. And there's still a lot of issues about when the trigger points are when we say here we are, we're giving the responsibility this fire from the chief officer to the fire service commissioner. So if it's a rubbish bin fire, house fire, it stays with the chief officer and within the CFA command structure. Gets much bigger than that then we transfer control over to the control arrangements of the state. When that happens, how that happens is still points of conjecture that we continually wanting to improve on. Some people, you might find this hard to believe, don't want to hand transfer over. I'm running this job well, I don't want to give it to the state. I've got enough resources here. What rights do they have to take my job and that would never happen in CFA etc. And on the other side of the screen, you do have people at the high level going, hang on, this job's getting big, we should take this one over. So there's still a little bit of tension there about when, how and what. So there's a lot of work being done in transfer and control. Traffic management points, again it's really a contentious issue that comes up probably every year. And with traffic management points, it is things like an example would be, we got criticised for instance for not allowing vets to return in to pass a fire line. But we put up barriers and said no one goes in there because it's dangerous. We had lots of stock particularly in the Gippsland area that were injured and not well that really we needed to get vets to, to properly euthanize or to deal with vets. So it was something we'd actually not on our radar, not called business. We hadn't really thought about it. The DPI said to us, are you buggers, you need to let us in. So okay, we need to change our practice. We need to provide a bit more clarity about who does and who doesn't get through traffic management points. So there's a bit of work happening there. All learnings and there was about three others that came up from previous years that we've worked on to try and improve on for this year. It's great to be back again for what is the preparedness for the next summer. If you look back though, we had a great summer last year. It was a very long summer, it was a very hot summer and it challenges us a lot. There was a lot of fires that were controlled in the initial stages which was a huge success and only a few that caused us significant concern and major resources. So if you look at that and say, well done, we now need to build off that and ensure that we are right for the next summer. The Bureau is clearly indicating it's got the potential to be a fire season of significance but it's much broader than that. It's not just about fire, it's got to be about heat, it's got to be about windy days, it's got to be about the dryness that we've got and fires are obviously one of those primary issues that we always face in Victoria. Primacy of life, protection of our people, has got to be critical. Likewise, safety of our crews and safety has got to be upfront, everything we do. There are two messages but there's more than that. It's about us working together and we clearly say now we work as one. It's a simple set of words but from the initial tack, all the way through to what will be a major incident, we need to work as one and stay together, work together, understand, respect but do it together and I think that's absolutely critical. Also there's a lot of opportunities that we'll have this season. Some of them are identified in the briefings and exercises we're working through now. Evacuation, traffic management, issuing information to the community and warnings, commander control, initial attack are all critical parts of what this exercise and briefing series of events across the state will bring but it starts here and we ask you to take this home for you to your brigade, to your SES unit, to your work location, take it back and make sure what you talk about here you take back to the others and they need your support to do that. So it's not the end of something, it's the start of the journey. I hope it's not a long summer but no doubt in Victoria we'll still have a summer and every time we have a summer we have those issues of fires or heat issues to deal with and I say let's do it together, we're a great team in Victoria, let's keep the great team being great and I wish you all the best for what will be a challenging but I've got no doubt a successful summer season. So you see some key themes that continue to be reinforced in that. We work as one, commander control, transfer of control, same sort of issues that we're almost themed up for us this year. The one slide that we're putting for this presentation that hasn't gone around the state is this one here and it's only because of a currency perspective that we often get asked well what's the season going to be. Short of having a crystal ball I guess no one can really tell us with any definitive outlook of what it is going to be. I usually say this that in Victoria we are one of the three documented scientific research, worst wildfire, bushfire, whatever you want to call it places in the world and it is because we have good rain and what have we got good rain. We have a hot center of the country that provides hot northerly winds and a wind change that comes through about 5.30. So if you put all that together on any given day we can have a fire. So it's really hard and everyone's having a chuckle at you and expense trying to do a he was out the front literally five minutes ago standing under umbrella pouring down rain and trying to give everybody a fire safety message and it really is quite difficult but the reality is and we've seen even early in the season I think yesterday or the day before quite windy, quite warm, had a couple of fires that have run but if you look here the predictions are warmer summer days expected for eastern Australia and also average chance of rainfall for Victoria dry season expected much you can read that for yourself. It's particularly the Bureau called splinters because they sit on the fence but the average chance of rainfall what's that mean you know like this bizarre but anyway the reality is for us we expect we will lose houses at some somewhere in the state now it's like Russian roulette I can't tell you where that is I can't tell you when it's going to happen but on our forecasting on similar years lead up years we've lost houses in in some parts of the state so it's not unlikely that somewhere in Victoria particularly during January January February and March we will lose some homes we will we've already had some significant fires and I'm sure we will continue to have more fires as the season goes on it's just the way of the world it's just where we live and what's going to be what's going to happen and what we can expect in here. Just to reinforce that we've now got a briefing from Tony Bannister from the Weather Bureau. Hi I want to talk to you about three topics in this preseason fire weather briefing first of these is the climate outlook for spring now a couple things we tend to look at first of those is a thing called the ENSO and what that is is you may have known that in terms of El Niño and La Niña and that's in a neutral phase so really that is is no real help to us at the moment the other thing that we look at that's in the Pacific the other thing that we look at is what's happening over in the Indian Ocean a thing called the Indian Ocean Dipole and since May that's been in negative territory and what that usually means for southern Australia is that over the winter spring period that it usually gets more rain than normal and what we've had over winter so far is it has panned out pretty well that most of Victoria has had more rain than normal so in terms of the outlook for Victoria this Indian Ocean Dipole which expected to last into mid-spring plus the above average sea surface temperatures around Victoria give an indication that for the central parts of Victoria is a likelihood of more rain than normal and also a corresponding likelihood of less than a maximum temperature okay now we'll talk about the second topic this is you may remember last season that we introduced forecasts for the next day at 25 locations giving weather information at the time of maximum fire danger now what has been decided is this will become the standard part of the standard product set for the next four days and whereas in previous years you've we've given you forecasts at the time of maximum temperature what we were doing now will be from this season on is give you information at time of max fire danger this is because we're now looking at all our spatial and spot location forecasts at time of max fire danger so this would become our standard forecast for the next four days the third topic i'd like to talk about is about a system called metai metai is a one-stop shop online weather briefing tool that will display current and forecast conditions over Victoria as well as Australia that you can bring up on your web things like current you can bring up temperature rh wind speed direction even radar and satellite imagery and looking out into our forecasts you can bring up things like wind or temperature or rh if you're used to using google maps then you'll be pretty comfortable with metai in terms of zooming and panning and putting layers on and off so i hope this information is useful in your preparation for the season and the bureau will keep you updated right through the season it's interesting when you listen to people like tony in in hindsight or retrospectively to say he actually said it was going to be a colder and wetter and i think that was realized wasn't it the coldest period of time so it's interesting looking that but they're now also forecasting warmer from now on in so if they're if they're consistent with their messaging then that's that's the way it's going to be um some doctrinal changes that we've been working on and i won't just conscious of the time now that state command and control arrangement bushfire believe it or not there is a document that all the chiefs sign up to to say that we work as one as a one team emergency management team arrangements emergency management team that is effectively what used to happen in the dim dark age is probably only a couple years ago is that we would go in with a lens of just putting out a fire so we would go there and say look our job is to put out the fire we pack up we go home and it goes for other incidents as well what we've identified only took us about a hundred years but is to say events such as a fire or an emergency event affect so many more people so at the time of an incident we set up what we call an emergency management team so an emergency management team may have local people represented on it they may have council if you if it's a particular fire in an area we may have recovery people we may have vets you may have people that would be impacted and straight to mind would be the power industries you know osnett sp osnett and the gas companies are now saying we want in we want in your decision making we want to be part of the journey so we've set up we call emergency management teams and they're on site or they're in icc so you can have them at incident at region or at state so incident management emergency management team or regional emergency management team or a state emergency management team and their whole idea is to make sure that those other parties that are not directly involved in the firefight have got an input or a knowledge about what's going on so it's a two-way street if you like so that process has been refined to ensure that we have local representation then there's a view now to say it's not just utilities it is about if there's a fire in your community is it the mayor who is representing your community on an emergency management team the j-stop arrangements and very quickly what we identified last year is we keep building systems and so we've said right we i think last year we said we've got 40 level 3 imt's across the state icc's across the state and on any trigger point day recommendation out of the royal commission you must cfa desk dse parks big mfbscs have x amount of people in there and so we've gone i-beauty okay we've got 40 times 40 people therefore we need literally thousands of people on on standby on any given day trouble when you look around there's no one to go in trucks because they're all in i-nt's at manning and manning it i'll now embellish that little bit but a real example was that we had the fire in uh first fire last year in the western part of the state and we couldn't resource the i-nt why because everybody else in the state were going no no i'm manning to make j-stop i have to have these people in place and i'm not letting them go so we couldn't move people around the state so we've done a lot of work to say let's cut down the number of imt icc's would have to man from 40 to 20 let's increase the footprint they they look after if something happens in that footprint then let's move resources into accommodate that particular area so it's a real rethink about how we man up um this is just readiness this is not when we go to war this is just say tomorrow is going to be a bad day we need to have people in place by 10 o'clock and this is the number we're going to have in place so it's had a complete overhaul and and review and a lot of times i've already talked about the guidelines for operations traffic management points during bushfires i won't address that again um aims for what and i what you may or may not know is that we run across australia uh new zealand um this part of the world this aim system the Australian incident uh management system uh and and it's just a system of managed so we're all on the same page now the police are just starting to buy into it um but the beauty for us is if we if we run out of people like we've had 20 people 20 imt's and we run out of people we can go to new south wales can you come and help us in our imt's we can actually go to america and say can you come and help us in our imt's because they run nims which is just their national incident management system so it's very similar so there's this compatibility well we've reviewed aims to accommodate some of the police's concerns when we didn't have intelligence we didn't have investigations etc and so it is about an effort of the fire services to say hey this management system is a system that we should use right across the country and after september 11 that the us set up the department of homeland security and they said everybody council workers every emergency service organization will run this system because if you know the history of september 11 it was a complete complete cluster and we're still still trying to come along that journey so things that have changed in aims in the review of it we've clarified that is the incident level i talked about incident region and state we've added flexibility so it can be flexible unity of command which means it's not agency it's about everybody in the country working together as one and again i won't go through them all other than to say this year we're looking to pilot the intelligence section which is about getting information turning that information into intelligence that will inform people like our warnings our people like our fire f-band that fire behaviour analysis people our planning people um to try and get more intelligence in we're going to pilot that this this year that's about all we're doing in regard to aims for but this change is happening right around the country interesting enough my little footnote is to say it's not really well resourced to implement it so those big changes we want to all change and we go to training and say well you've got to change your manuals you've got to change your practices we've got to change so it's not just saying we're going to do this we've actually got to change a lot that goes with it i think we'll move on from that one warnings and advice interesting again in the warnings and advice that um location based telephone alerting so the change this year is a i'm not sure all the uh all the all the telcos are on board last year it was only telstra this year we've got octas and vodafone so they're all on board last year most of what i think i think i'm not sure what it was implemented but certainly this year it's location based so we can draw a polygon around an area and say every mobile phone in that area will get a message where it used to go to the billing address so even if you lived in that area um but we're in sydney on holidays you'll get your warning and if you're on holidays in that area you wouldn't have got a warning where now we can actually do that polygon and everybody gets that warning in that particular space one source one message effectively this is to say that when we put a message out all the agencies put the same message out with the same template and the same look about it and so there's no inconsistencies if i go back to well unfortunately 2009 and probably not their long after if you look at the cfa web page we'd have uh different information we'd have completely different information we look differently that it didn't have the same information so now we're saying no there's one avenue one source one message from the agencies there's consistency across the state in what we're saying and within that i talked about the multilingual before the templates i'm going to spend a little bit more time on the templates and community fire refuges um there are three there was always a woodpoint which is effectively a mine and there was no others this year we're piloting three uh refuges two in the era of ranges and one in um um murable murable shy i think it is it it damaged a long way anyway black blackwood is where it is so we're trialing those as well and awesome will actually um activate sirens community alerts islands it will um open up refuges and do that type of work for us so it is all interconnect these are the templates the first thing that you probably see out of that is the color so there's actually moved in the modern ages and got some color we can put into it but make it look a bit fancy you'll also see it's it's multi-badged but the key changes here in in these uh these um templates and they are templates are they um give more specific information so last year the templates were almost standard and if you look them and occasionally you do you almost got to the stage where you knew where the one line of information was and the rest of it was really generic information whether you went for a rubbish bin advice or a warning template etc they're all very generic this year for the people entering the data in there's prompts that will say quite specific we want to get to the stage where we where we're actually saying Joan there's a fire in your spot and our advice is you go down this road turn left and put yourself there if you're not quite specific now that's a real challenge for us to get to that layer of of detail when we're providing information to the community that's probably objective and again as i said before these things continue to improve as we get more specific information and again you can see we've still got some still have some generic information about safety but the other the other interesting thing here which is good are these hyperlinks so if somebody now you don't have to go look up yourself you can just link on if you want more information out about a specific subject it will take you there pretty simple sort of stuff but compared to where we were last year's probably more continue to improve the services in this particular area the other thing again about standards of warnings and or we debated where we put this up but it's just it's interesting to know that what the warnings just don't aren't someone saying oh look i reckon it should be this or i reckon it should be that what you see here so if i take you down to the grass fdi between 50 and 99 if it's impacted a fire of within say two to six hours then you issue a watch an act message so it's quite specific to the warnings and advice people it says like if you think the fire is going to impact if the danger is this and it's going to impact on the community in this amount of time then this is the warning that you need to go to there's no subjectivity to it there's a little bit a little bit in there i guess and the subjectivity is well okay fire behavior people how long is that fire away and when will they be impacted and is it direct flame content is it smoke those sort of issues but a lot more of the subjectivity so we can actually quite specific in win and what we give people in a timing sense so it's just sort of interesting to know and have that background and what you don't see up there interesting enough is the evacuation so that's determined by the incident controller and and that's never really been that triggers never really been pulled in anger but it has in in training any questions on any of that aircraft we're getting towards the end of it now a couple of things that we didn't talk about out front one of the chiefs in fact driven by our chief was to really focus on hitting fires hard and fast and changing some of our ways that we do our business the general thinking is here that if we can get them out early and and resource them heavily we may make some mistakes and over resource initially but if they say fires from extending into weeks and in some instances 2006 2003 in months then it would be well and truly money well spent within the state now weigh that up against being counters and have different views what we've decided this year to do a couple of things pre predetermined dispatch expanded in other words on a trigger point day in a high-risk area sorry let's go back a step historically if I wanted an aircraft I actually literally have to ring the phone or pick the radio up and ask for an aircraft and this is the aircraft I want what's happening this season we started at last year and it's been expanded this season no if it's in a trigger point day and it's in a high-risk area that's I almost the battle of Britain you know that the helicopter people we scramble themselves and they jump in there and they can deploy themselves now there's some safety issues that we need to make sure there's aircraft officers air attack supervisors and that whole support mechanism so it's not just as simple as it sounds but those sort of safety procedures are being put in place to ensure that happens the other one is a bit of a wanky term in my view is is this wolf pack concept which is they'll hunting packs is all it means now it sounds like we've been watching too many tv movies but for some reason it's stuck and whereby in a couple of locations now you will actually not get one aircraft you automatically will get two or maybe three aircraft and they will be much more effective working as a pack to go and hit the fire an interesting side note I've got an email from we last year we tried a new helicopter up in sea lake because of declining volunteerism a big crop area etc and so and really positive feedback where the aircraft are getting on scene able to at least slow the fire up would give time for our trucks to get on scene so being really really effective and quite quite impressive almost embarrassing why we haven't done that or thought of that in the past cycles for the the aircraft look we have on average about 50 aircraft to pre-deployed across the state all strategically located sometimes we go at a state level we'll go look tomorrow you saw Tony we're actually able to say to us tomorrow it's going to be the western district at up until three o'clock but as it moves over it will become Gippsland we're actually able to go right we're going to put a crane we'll put it in at Esiden once it's finished there we might put it back down in La Trobe valley we can move subtly some aircraft but again you've got to have air attacks you've got to have fuel tankers you've got to have nominated air bases and etc that goes with that so a change in the way we do our aircraft but we're always being challenged about how effective they cost a fair amount of money do we get value for money etc so we need to continually justify that E-MAC functionality probably I reckon one of the best things that CFA and DEPI probably one of the first things we've actually got together and developed a product collaboratively together that I think I think someone might be in the room as one awards it's practically used and interesting it was designed by the user at the end of the day by our people and DEPI people and effectively it what the E-MAC does it allows you to go on and there's overlays on it so fire point B it'll tell you in a spatial sense where the prediction of that fire will be at a certain given time so we had that last year and you can see you can it put a bit of a clot up there for us and it'll take the big change this way is consequence analysis in that footprint it'll actually tell us how many schools if there's a pine plantation if there's a nursing home if there's a you know a structural risk in the area whether that's just a touristy area what are the things are actually in the area so when we're planning we go you know it and it can be I didn't know there was a scout camp there in the front of this fire and we can start to focus our energies to the consequence of this particular fire again a pretty simple step but I reckon for us pretty exciting the Fleur imagery interrogation it's integrating the aircraft so we can validate some of that with the aircraft and checked I didn't say in the aircraft we've got an aircraft this year for the first time we'll just do have a gimbal on it that will actually just take photos that we can actually make some decisions from not from the air but it'll feed it back into the IMT so we can get live understanding what's happening with the fire so some really good stuff happening in this emap area and is available to everybody that pretty well works in an IMT or in the field you get that sort of product that we can put into the field if I go back when I first started we never got maps the key messages the last slide our job is the protection of life the state's job is the protection of life and part of that life is that we don't put a value judgment on it is also or includes the life of our people so if you like the statement you might have heard in some location everybody comes home now when you make those sort of statements sometimes our people get pretty pissed off when you take a risk averse approach and we've made decisions before we're not putting our people in our people will love to go in but sometimes they don't go in because they're coming home and sometimes that's a hard decision to make but nonetheless where everybody comes home and our job is to protect community and don't get me started on community safety because we'll probably save more environment on empowering communities than we will ever in a fire truck but I won't go down that track safety of our crews and safety of our people is everything we do as a number one priority and we work as one integrated team look you know we still still haven't nutted that one but again if you look at the bigger picture if I go back not long ago there was literally fights on the fire ground with different agencies and you know we're a wet agency DSE or dry agency we'd put fire out and they'd come along and light them up again and so there was blues between the we don't do that anymore you know we we actually do get on believe it or not there is a healthy respect for each other when we sit in an IMT whether it's a CFA patch or DSE patch we don't care as long as the person has the competencies and the qualifications to the to the job that's all we worry about we work together we train together we all get on pretty well but we need to improve communications we need to improve systems etc so that again will be a an iterative process that we go as we improve