Victoria/Australia Emergency Services Commissioner Bruce Esplin (who is evidently a close kin to Uncle Fester) and his co-emergency functionaries.======
Just in case you were wondering if the United States has a monopoly on organizational stupidity, here's this story.
BLACK SATURDAY is an expression used for the weekend in Australia when wildfires killed dozens of people in that country. In fact, it proved to be the worst fire disaster in the nation's history. The warning sirens were not sounded that night, sirens which might have prepared folks to flee the catastrophe.
Why weren't the sirens used? Because officials didn't want to overuse them. They were saving them for an emergency. Ta-DA!
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3 comments:
Well, it's hard to believe the sirens weren't used. I don't think anyone knew where the fires were because they were moving so fast and there were so many of them. They weren't just bushfires where normal procedures could be used, and the system couldn't handle the speed and ferocity. Obviously the system needs to be able to cope with these firestorms, because they aren't that uncommon. Apparenly, you need to choose early whether to stay or leave, because there is a point where it is more dangerous to flee then to stay. In these cases, I don't think fleeing was ever an option, so the sirens would have been useless. Many people died when they panicked at the last minute and tried to leave by car. The smoke was so bad people could not see the road and people positioned 100 metres away from the flames nearly died from the heat alone. A terrible day.
Thanks for the comments, Irene. You got me thinking maybe I shouldn't have been so sarcastic, but then I went back to the story itself which came here on May 13th, I believe.
Here's what I relied on:
Mr Esplin said the signal was for special and specific purposes and it had to be signed off by a chain of command, described by counsel assisting the inquiry, Rachael Doyle, as a "cumbersome" process.
He added authorities didn't want it overused.
"It's a balance between not overusing the . . . sound and therefore desensitising the community to its importance and having a method which is as efficient . . . as possible," he said. (end quote)
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I know this isn't the whole story, but it sounded pretty off-base to me.
Sorry - I didn't mean to sound critical of your assessment of the Uncle Fester look-alike as wacko of the week (unlike the week with Chavez with the parrot on his shoulder). It's ridiculous if the sirens weren't used - it's hard to believe what kind of worse circumstances they were waiting for - and all of Victoria knew that the Saturday was going to be bad (predicted highs were 110 degrees with 60 mph winds). More info has come out of the inquiry - like a fire expert in mapping and tracking fires being in the same room as the head fire chief, but the head fire chief not knowing he was sitting next to the bloke... I suppose the point I am trying to make is that even if everything has been done according to the book, it might not have made much difference because the fires were so bad. The "book" will be rewritten as a result of this inquiry.
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