Heroes of Black Saturday point to leadership failings
The Age
Tuesday July 28, 2009
THE commitment and courage of those who fought the Black Saturday fires is in no doubt. As Premier John Brumby told The Age: "I think everybody in the CFA did their best to protect the state. In terms of effort and endeavour, I don't think you can fault that." Yet Country Fire Authority brigades, in submissions to the Bushfires Royal Commission, have found plenty to fault in those who landed them with inadequate systems and equipment. Their harrowing accounts raise questions about state funding and about CFA leaders' diligence in ensuring that communications and emergency systems were up to date and accessible to all who needed them.While Mr Brumby has backed CFA chiefs, the brigades contend that lives were lost because repeated warnings of problems had been ignored. The Lower Yarra Group of Fire Brigades said it had been raising for 10 years "serious communication problems" in an area where 54 people were killed. It was submitted that the CFA was unwilling to spend any more on communications, which failed badly on Black Saturday, because it planned to switch to a digital network in more than five years' time. Brigades simply lacked enough radios to do their job. The "systems failures" that Mr Brumby acknowledges were predictable. The Government has implicitly admitted its responsibility for such deficiencies by providing hundreds of millions of dollars for new equipment, including radio and paging services, rescue vehicles and tankers.This after-the-fact response does not absolve the Government for its neglect of long-standing shortcomings in the CFA funding model. If firefighting capacities and systems were knowingly or negligently allowed to run down, CFA chiefs should also be held to account. However heroic the CFA's efforts during the fires, that does not let its leadership off the hook for what proved to be disastrous failures of administrative oversight.
© 2009 The Age
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