SPECIAL REPORT
Three lessons in resilience as Australia rebuilds Anna Murray, Senior Account Executive at IFS Australia
The saying is that every fighter has a plan until they get punched. It is then that the plan goes out the window, even as the fruits of planning for contingencies become central. In Australia, we are in a similar situation, having been hit by record bush fires in late 2019 through to February 2020 that will make us re-examine how we prepare for, manage and then recover from disasters, including fire, tsunami and even global pandemics. The thing is, Australia has been here before and has tried to plan for this future after the Black Saturday fires of February 2009 saw such devastating losses. We had offered buybacks of properties in fire-prone areas that few landowners took while the insurance industry is coming to terms for the risk 52
Construction Engineering Australia • Apr/May 2020
associated in rebuilding, driving premiums in some cases to $10,000 per year. We are, more than ever, learning to track and manage the changing cost of using our land during a time of environmental change. As we plan our recovery from these bush fires, the rest of the world is coming to terms with a new threat in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Immediately, supply chains are disrupted, most notably for companies reliant on container ships full of inventory from China. Ports saw as much as an 85 percent decline in Chinese-made goods. Many of us may remember similar disruption during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003. What do our recent bush fires and the current pandemic have in common? They are part of recurring patterns. As business executives, we should be able to identify and plan our business activities around these patterns. What are the tactics we Australians, and others around the world who periodically face natural disasters, use to help us rebuild today, and plan for a more secure future?
1. MAXIMISE USE OF MODULAR, OFFSITE CONSTRUCTION Offsite construction is already growing in popularity globally, although in Australia it represents just 3 percent of the residential construction industry even as companies like Lendlease build out central fabrication facilities to handle increasing demand. Offsite manufacturing enables the industry to increase productivity. Will modular or offsite construction be a boon to us as we rebuild in 2020 and beyond? Offsite fabrication plants may experience high utilization rates for sure, but the availability of offsite capacity in terms of fabrication facilities, personnel and processes may prevent us from using modular construction for a sizable proportion of our immediate need.
2. CHANGE THE WAY WE BUILD TO MITIGATE FUTURE RISK Here in Australia, we are already debating whether we should rebuild in some particularly fire-prone areas. Apart from where to rebuild, how we do it can leave
