Publish or perish: the need for fire research to be both public and published

By Danielle Clode

There is no doubt that the findings of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission were eagerly awaited.  The fire agencies were on tenterhooks, not knowing what to do or how to do it until their fate and future direction was determined.  Those living in the bushfire areas had been waiting for some sense of closure over those terrible events.  We all wanted answers—we needed to know what we could do to make sure the disaster of Black Saturday is never repeated.

But has the Royal Commission been able to meet these high expectations?  After months of listening, questioning and reading through mountains of evidence, do the findings provide the answers?  Did they ask the right questions?  Why did 173 people die?

There is undoubtedly a wealth of valuable information contained in the multiple volumes of the Royal Commission findings and the even more voluminous records of witness statements.  But finding the answers is both challenging and time-consuming.  Collecting and collating the raw data is actually the easy part of the process.  Analysing it, and making sense of it all, is the difficult bit.

In this sense, there is a real risk that people may think the process of understanding Black Saturday ends with the findings.  In fact, the real work has yet to begin.  A mountain of research into Black Saturday has yet to be published – how the fires spread and behaved, the impact of fire weather,  what factors assisted in house survival, and perhaps most importantly of all, what factors saved lives.

In the 18 months since Black Saturday there has been virtually no research published in the major international journals.  By comparison, in the 18 months after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster nearly 250 research papers were published on it. The entire literature now runs into the thousands.  In the 18 months after Ash Wednesday in 1983,  a dozen research papers made it into print.  Just six months after the Haiti earthquake, 25 papers have already been published.  And yet a year and a half after Australia’s worst bushfire disaster, with millions of dollars spent on inquiries and investigations, few papers have been published in reputable international journals. I counted three.

Where is the rest of the research?  I honestly expected that the data on fire severity, the role of weather, fuel loads and local conditions would start to emerge within weeks if not months of the fires.  But as time ticked away, it seemed that more and more effort was being directed into anticipating what information the Royal Commission might want, and less and less into answering the important questions.    Where are the papers on factors influencing survival (of both people and buildings)?  Where are the analyses of the fatalities and what went wrong? 

Research is being conducted, but it has yet to be scrutinised by the wider scientific community and assessed for its validity or veracity.  There is little doubt that much of the research effort has been subsumed by the Royal Commission process.

The Commission was a legal process—a system which has evolved, in essence, to allocate responsibility.  Much has been made in this process of the need for “evidence” and the need for an “evidence-based” approach to fire management in the future.  But we need to understand that legal evidence (even in a Royal Commission) is a very different thing to scientific evidence.  The Commission was able to access a wider range of evidence (such as hearsay) than is available in normal legal processes.   But legal processes do not subject that evidence to the same kinds of scrutiny that scientific processes do. Legal evidence is weighted strongly in favour of individual expert opinion and the ability to forcefully articulate that opinion.  Courts and commissions rely strongly on personal testimony, and depend upon personal testimony being both truthful and accurate.  Cognitive psychology strongly suggests, however, that our memories of past events are more reconstructions than recollections and under traumatic conditions like fires our ability to lay down memories is severely compromised.

This is not to suggest that individual testimonies are inaccurate or of no value, but simply that the shared features of testimonies may be of more value—more accurate—than individual recollections.  Case studies may be more prone to inaccuracies than patterns observed across a large number of cases.  

Scientific evidence is based on the analysis of data and patterns in data.  It tests for alternative explanations, and does not lightly accept the obvious answers. In reaching their conclusions, scientists must draw support from their own data and from previous research in the field.  And ultimately these conclusions themselves must undergo the highly critical and sceptical assessment of many peers in order to be published.  Once published, these conclusions are then open to other researchers to discuss, revisit, contest and dispute, a dramatically different outcome from the legal concept of “precedence” created by court cases. 

The legal and scientific processes of evidence are fundamentally different, both in the way they generate knowledge and in the purpose for which that knowledge is generated. And they are not always compatible.

With 173 deaths and over 2000 homes lost, Black Saturday presents a regrettable database that deserves thorough investigation.  Reading through the accounts of the fatalities in the Royal Commission report gives the impression that many of these people faced overwhelming fire conditions, that there was little they could have done under the circumstances.  In some cases, that may well have been true.  We owe it to these people, their families and the survivors of these fires, to look more carefully at these fatalities.  Was there anything at all that they as individuals, or we as a community, could have done to have prevented these deaths?  Could they have been better prepared?  Could their properties have been better prepared? What kinds of preparation would have been most important, would have been most effective?

The answers are there.  Preliminary (unpublished) research presented to the Royal Commission tells us that vegetation management around homes played an important role in survival, that newer houses survived better.  Fuel loads around houses appear to have had a major impact on the amount of time people had to shelter inside their homes, extending the time their houses had to survive undefended.  Setbacks and the amount of defendable space was important in survival, and that perhaps these spaces need to be bigger for severe fires.  My own unpublished research found that community education is effective—that the homes of active members of Community Fireguard Groups were 20 per cent more likely to survive than those of neighbours who weren’t actively involved.  But will this research, and more like it, ever by published and be made available to the public? 

Without publishable scientific research it is unlikely that the information from these fires will ever be subjected to the thorough analysis it requires.  Without publication, it is unlikely that people in fire-prone areas will ever have access to the kind of reliable and sound information they need to keep themselves safe.

Research is like fire, it needs fuel and heat to get going.  At the moment, Australian fire research is smouldering, with an occasional flash of brilliance here and there to give us hope.  It has a long way to go before it is a sustainable and thriving discipline. 

Now that the Commission has ended, money for completing work begun for it has run out.  Already limited research budgets have been cut, funding is unavailable and there are questions over access to some of the basic data.  The full circumstances of the fatalities, for example, are still the subject of criminal and coronial investigations and it is not clear when or if the information will be available for expert analysis.  There is a very real risk that some of this research will never be completed or published and the opportunity for learning from this tragedy will be lost.

The Royal Commission calls for the need for more research and for an evidence-based approach to fire management in the future.  I hope that call is heard.  It would be a sad irony indeed if the Commission itself had drained the coffers and impeded the completion of this vital work.

Dr Danielle Clodeis the author of A Future in Flames (MUP, 2010) and this article was first recorded on the Science Show, ABC Radio National.  It is reproduced and extended here with permission. She also presented at the September 2010 Bushfire CRC/AFAC Annual Conference in Darwin on “Don’t be afraid: the psychology of bushfire response.”

This article is the personal opinion of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of the Bushfire CRC.