...set large numbers of fires in vunerable areas at exactly the same time.
Now imagine if it happened in WA, SA, VIC, ACT, NSW simaltaneously.
Imagine that scenario, the devastation that it could potentially cause over great areas affecting a massive amount of the Australian population!
When you look at the challenges just SA would face its scary.....
Australia would not be able to mitigate fully any natural disaster that would affect multiple states of Australia..hopefully the EMA and others have plans to call in other countries (eg USA) as needed.
In SA, my crystal ball predicts, it would be life protection & critical asset protection for a week plus by everyone. I believe lives & townships would be lost.
By critical assets I mean the stuff like the electricity interlink (large % of state electricity for many months), freight to get food & fuel (I think we only have a few weeks of petrol in storage), major industries, hospitals, etc.
Twenty years ago I did scenarios of an earthquake on the fault line that runs under Flinders Medical Centre & Marion Shopping Centre. This was a desktop exercise in emergency planning in our response zone (Mitcham) that considered that South Road was cut & the southern metropolitan suburbs was a mess.
I assume you have seen a large emergency plan for your response area that I think is co-ordinated by the Police.
If you run the desktop exercise in your township, stating you are the first emergency service responders with what you have around you to work with. Nothing else. Backup strike-force & aircraft resources are not available for 24 hours from now, because they are cut-off by the fire & deployed elsewhere.
Where would you place an evacuation, triage centre ? What are the critical assets in your area & how would you protect them from looters & fire, with the resources you have ? Do you know how to contact extra resources like community service clubs (Lions, Rotary, etc) to mann the evacuation centre ? What do the Scout groups have that could be used (tents, camp cooking facilties, etc) ? What can transport/trucking companies supply ? Do you know how to contact the WICEN amateur radio operators in your area ? How would you supply toilets & drinking water for the evacuation centre ? Do you know where the gas, eletricity & water distribution centres are ? Red Cross and Dept Families & Communities do the people tracking. Do you know who the people are in those departments ?
The list is endless and interesting....
A comment made a few years ago, that has always stayed with me "...a major fire was burning in a community & township. The emergency planners decided to save the houses & risk the industry. The industry complex was lost to fire....several years later the township was deserted...the cause was that the industry decided it was not worth rebuilding, so they closed. No one was employed, so the people left the township".
Which caused the more damage to the community. The fire or the decision ?
To me, no answer is ever 100% right to hard questions. But this could be a scenario for the long term survival of your local community.
