Fires in Canberra: the blame game?

It is intensely disappointing that already, so soon after the devastation of the Saturday Canberra fires, that some people are already looking to apportion blame. I hope this is attributable to shock, as I believe that the majority of those who have lost houses are preparing to rebuild their lives with quiet dignity. However, if I think of the tenacious litigant spirit of some families of September 11 victims in New York, I am not certain that there will not be a protracted, litigious blaming process. I sincerely hope the Canberra community will not go down that path. Still, angry voices have been raised, and that anger has become an issue deserving some comment.

“Why were we not warned earlier?” some have asked. At the risk of sounding callous, we were, as long ago as November, if anyone was listening. But bushfire, like fatal traffic accidents, are things we believe happen to other people, not us. There is a price to be paid for living in and around the bush, and while that price should never be your house, it is – at least – vigilance. Yes, the victims of this disaster should be able to expect state assistance. Yes, they may feel angry. But, no, in a time of disaster and scare public resources they are not owed an explanation as to why their particular home was destroyed - harsh as that may sound. That question is simply unanswerable: as are many of the questions posed by tragedies.

We have lost, in our secular, scientific age, some of our ability to cope with disaster. In a time when we are taught there is an explanation for everything, we have come to believe everything that happens is someone’s fault, and implicitly - that it was preventable.

There certainly are structural issues that need to be addressed. Canberra’s pine plantations were laid out long ago and it was never seriously anticipated at the time that houses would ever back onto them. The “bush setting” of seventies and eighties suburbs lined with native trees did put a heavy fuel load among houses. The consequences for an urban environment are now apparent.

Also, at the level of highest co-ordination and control, there are worrying signs that the ACT Emergency Services elites may not have a chain of command that allowed for suburb-by-suburb coordination, meaning that bushfire-fighting units that rushed into the city arrived on the scene and found no-one to whom to report. (These command failures, even if they are found to have happened, of course do not reflect on the heroism of fire-fighters in the front line, some of whom lost thier own homes while defending others'.) Also, despite talk of the need for firebreaks, the army, presently on a high level of readiness and equipped with bulldozers of its own, was not requested to make those firebreaks.

All big-picture stuff, clear with 20-20 hindsight. Would any of it have prevented property loss? I doubt it. With a heavy fuel load in national parks and winds gusting at 100 kilometres an hour, as soon as the fires were able to outrace the fire trucks there was going to be significant loss of property. Could the city have used another dozen fire-trucks? Certainly, but it could also use more teachers, hospital beds and better remand centre facilities. Public resources will always be finite, and will not always be enough to prevent disaster.

Yet, like the congressional inquiries in the US into “intelligence failures” in the CIA and FBI, we will see things with vision shaped by tragic experience that in retrospect look like palpable, inevitable threats that were impossible to ignore – and yet were ignored. We have to distinguish learning from what is, for a particular community a vast, previously unimaginable disaster; and a need to apportion blame for it. We must also bear in mind how lucky we have been that the loss of life has been so limited, compared to other, greater unexpected calamities of recent times.

If there are questions to be asked, it can be done at the coroner’s inquest and in any parliamentary investigation. For once I agree with a the Prime Minister, there will be a time for reflection and asking questions, but it should be without acrimony and apportioning blame, and that time is not now. Also, given his own recent involvement in an impromptu rescue operation that clearly left him shaken – I think Jon Stanhope’s “blame me, not the fire-fighters” stance is a rare and noble exercise in ministerial responsibility.

Frankly, the press-gallery piranhas trying to stir up a controversy out of the comments of Wilson Tuckey, a figure usually best ignored, need to take a long hard look at themselves. (Mr McGuiness' bitter little aphorisms are also beneath comment.) This is a time to pull together, and that includes responsible reporting.

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