Community safety and engagement

Lake Clifton fires 2011

The report of a Bushfire CRC task force led by Professor Jim McLennan of La Trobe University into the Lake Clifton fire near Perth on 10 January 2011 has just been published.

Task force members interviewed members of 35 households from with the affected area and five on its edge about their bushfire preparation and knowledge.

Understanding the Context: The value of community engagement in bushfire risk communication and education. Observations following the East Coast Tasmania bushfires of December 2006

T. Prior and Paton, D., Understanding the Context: The value of community engagement in bushfire risk communication and education. Observations following the East Coast Tasmania bushfires of December 2006, Australasian Journal of Disaster and Trauma Studies, pp. 1-15, 2006.

Children's knowledge of bushfire hazards

Fire Note 89: Pioneering Bushfire CRC research is helping children learn about bushfires and other hazards as well as helping education, emergency service and other authorities enhance the effectiveness of bushfire education campaigns.

Before Bushfire CRC PhD scholar Briony Towers began talking to children as part of research into children’s knowledge of bushfire hazards, few if any researchers into disasters and hazards had asked what children knew about such matters.

Lake Clifton fires report

The report of a Bushfire CRC task force led by Professor Jim McLennan of La Trobe University into the Lake Clifton fire near Perth on 10 January this year has just been published.

Task force members interviewed members of 35 households from with the affected area and five on its edge about their bushfire preparation and knowledge.

Ten houses were lost in the fire.

Defining Community: Debates and implications for bushfire policy

Fire Note 88: The increasing use of the term “community” can be seen as part of an international trend in disaster management towards formally recognising the importance of community power, resilient communities and encouraging links between communities and government institutions.

However a potential difficulty with the trend towards integrating “community” into policy discourse is that the term itself often remains vague and undefined. 

Checklist items for researchers: Householder preparations for bushfires

Fire Note 87: Bushfire CRC researchers Jim McLennan and Glenn Elliott of La Trobe University have produced a handy booklet for community bushfire safety researchers that provides a checklist of questions about household bushfire preparation activities.

Their booklet, Checklist Items For Researchers: Householder Preparations For Bushfires, is based on questions originally drafted for a survey of residents after the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday bushfires, updated, reviewed and expanded.

Inventory of major materials present in and around houses and their combustion emission products

Population shifts towards city centres and the expanding rural-urban fringe are likely to increase firefighting in urban and rural-urban settings. At present, extensive research on occupational exposures has been conducted at bushfires within Australia [1]; however the complexity and heterogeneous setting of the rural-urban interface (RUI) makes it difficult to extrapolate existing research findings to the urban and rural-urban context.

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