“One of the tragedies of this disaster is that it appears many people have died in motor vehicles. People are most at risk as the front passes and having something to protect you from the radiant heat is absolutely critical and the place not to be is in a motor vehicle.

It’s interesting to contemplate how we often feel safe in our cars, in the days when people in Australia didn’t have cars, you just wonder whether the same death rate would have occurred in these fires, people would have stayed with their homes and may have been safer because they weren’t given the choice.”
Sandy McFarlane is a psychiatry professor and Head of the Centre for Military & Veterans' Health at the University of Adelaide. He is a leading authority on post-traumatic stress disorder and conducted the first studies into the traumatic effects of the Ash Wednesday bushfires. His studies into the impact of the Ash Wednesday bushfires are some of the most cited disaster studies in the world.

“The other disturbing thing is that probably a lot of the deaths are on the roads, in motor vehicles. There’s pretty concrete evidence that you’re much safer staying with your building. A lot of these houses actually burnt after the fire front had passed because while they do catch fire, it takes a while for them to burn down, so even if you’re in a house which is on fire in the early stages, you’re actually safer than being outside.”
Professor Ross Bradstock is the Director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong. His expertise is in fire science, fire ecology, climate change and risk management.

“Although it remains unclear what factors cause such a decline in decision-making ability, ………the weather situation and the fire situation that actually occurred on Saturday would have placed decision makers in situations which exceeded the limits of human decision making abilities on many levels.

This resulted in the need for urgent decisions to be made under extreme uncertainty. Firefighters in both incident control centers and on the fire-ground would have had to make such decisions in the face of fire and weather conditions outside their knowledge and experience.”

Dr Mary Omodei is from La Trobe University’s School of Psychological Science in Melbourne. She has worked in bushfire research for a number of years with a focus on how humans (eg: emergency services) exert decision making control over complex systems.

 “This is because most people are not psychologically prepared for the noise and heat of a mega fire. This is especially the case when you have children or other vulnerable people that you also have to care for. The psychology of coping with fire is extremely important. The …… heat and the sound can drive people to distraction, even when they feel psychologically prepared beforehand…….knowing that you may be on your own for anything from 3 hours to 3 days.”

Associate Professor Robert Heath is a psychologist and crisis management expert at the University of South Australia
“Fire is vicious, often unpredictable and you have to be prepared to adjust to the circumstances. Conditions change and things go wrong. When that happens you have to reassess and adapt your plans according to the situation.”

Professor Ian Thomas is a fire engineer and director of Victoria University’s Centre for Environmental Safety and Risk Engineering (CESARE). Professor Thomas and his wife protected their property at Glenburn, north-east of Kinglake, during Saturday’s bushfire using bucketed water after the pump on his fire hose and sprinklers broke down.

“One important issue we need to address is people’s expectations of rescue teams.  Part of this preparation for staying with your house when a fire is approaching is  knowing that you may be on your own for anything from 3 hours to 3 days.

 The media (including disaster movies and similar television programs) and modern technology has given us the expectation of rapid response times which are unrealistic in extreme bushfire or other extreme situations. In the past people were more self-reliant because they knew they were on their own.

Added to this is our growing population and the continuing movement into bushy suburban areas. More work needs to be done to explain to people that when there are extreme fires, they may well be on their own without help. This may impact on their decision to stay and fight the fire or evacuate.”
Associate Professor Robert Heath is a psychologist and crisis management expert at the University of South Australia

“Everybody that lives in a bushfire prone house should look at their insurance policies today because many homes cost a lot more to re-build than people have them insured for and people always underestimate the value of the contents of their home.
One of the tragedies that will occur after these fires is that many people will find that although they are insured, the insurance won’t cover what they’ve lost.”
Sandy McFarlane is a psychiatry professor and Head of the Centre for Military & Veterans' Health at the University of Adelaide. He is a leading authority on post-traumatic stress disorder and conducted the first studies into the traumatic effects of the Ash Wednesday bushfires. His studies into the impact of the Ash Wednesday bushfires are some of the most cited disaster studies in the world.

“One of the lessons that we repeatedly learn from disasters is that the time that people need psychological support and counselling is not in the immediate aftermath. What is always underestimated is the long tail of effect of these events.

These are events that impact on communities for years. Inevitably what occurs is that health resources tend to get withdrawn after about a year. After the Ash Wednesday bush fires we studied the time it took for people to begin to seek help from their GPs for their health related problems, depression and post traumatic stress disorder.

The peak is about two years after the event. Initially people believe that they can cope with their distress, that time will get it better, but the evidence is that often it doesn’t and when they come forward wanting help, the specialist services that have been put in place have disappeared. There is a real need for planners not to make that same mistake that represents a significant risk.

Sandy McFarlane is a psychiatry professor and Head of the Centre for Military & Veterans' Health at the University of Adelaide. He is a leading authority on post-traumatic stress disorder and conducted the first studies into the traumatic effects of the Ash Wednesday bushfires. His studies into the impact of the Ash Wednesday bushfires are some of the most cited disaster studies in the world.

“Interestingly, many people who light fires deliberately are local. They either live in the area or have friends or family members in the area. There are four broad categories of arsonists. Some suffer from a feeling of impotence and light fires to give themselves a sense of being in control. Another group has a psychological attraction to fire and seeing things burn. The third group has a need to be seen as a hero and so tends to light fires to provide opportunities to show heroic traits. The last group likes to build fires in parklands and gullies in urban areas or in buildings and then often stay to watch them burn.”

Associate Professor Robert Heath is a psychologist and crisis management expert at the University of South Australia

“There are only a couple of psychologies to do with arson and bushfires.
One of them is excitement - the person who lights the fire, whether it’s a male or a female (there are recorded cases of both sexes lighting fires), gets some sort of perverse thrill out of starting a fire, watching it intensify and spread. In a lot of cases they don’t take into consideration what may happen once the fire intensifies and reaches structures, the damage it could do to buildings or the fact that it might even kill people. They don’t really think about these things.

The other thing is an arsonist might be on some sort of ego trip where they start a fire, and then alert the fire brigade, alert neighbours, and try to assist to put the fire out. In a way they’re trying to ingratiate themselves to firefighters, to police, and to the local community, saying that they’ve actually discovered this fire and are saving the community. In other cases you might just have someone who thinks, well this is a good time to start a fire to burn off some of the dead bushes and grass on my property, and the fire gets away from them, they can’t put it out, and it gets into dense forest and you have a major bushfire on your hands.
These are the major psychologies for arsonists in bushfire areas that we should be looking at.”

Mr Ross Brogan is former chief fire investigator with NSW Fire and now adjunct lecturer on fire investigation in the Australian Graduate School of Policing at Charles Sturt University in NSW.