Isolated towns and communities

In the second case, while a State of Disaster enables police to compel evacuation, these powers were not invoked, and people responded to the recommendation to leave voluntarily. Between 3–6 January 2020, VicPol successfully facilitated the evacuation and relocation of more than 66,000 people from the potential impact zones in the North East, Alpine and East Gippsland areas. Regarding the final evacuation option – moving to a local place of last resort shelter – the experience of the 2019–20 fires again illustrated a lack of understanding of what these facilities are intended to provide. A Neighbourhood Safer Place – Bushfire Place of Last Resort (NSP-BPLR) is only intended for use when all other bushfire shelter options (including leaving early) have already failed. It is not an alternative to evacuation. While it may be a location to which an Incident Controller directs people to take shelter in extreme conditions, there is no guarantee that it will provide safe shelter for people. NSP-BPLRs are often still confused with community fire refuges, relief centres, and evacuation points. On balance, the success of evacuation advice and the individual decisions made by community members and visitors in fire affected areas was borne out by the small number of civilian fatalities in Victoria despite the severity and extent of the fires.

The very location of the communities affected during the fires, especially those in the Alpine and Gippsland areas, meant that they were likely to be cut off for days – and in some cases weeks. Many of these communities (and individual properties) are already remote; the impact of the fires rendered them isolated.

Remoteness works both for and against communities in these circumstances. Such communities by their nature tend to be highly resilient and, in many ways, self-sufficient. These factors work in their favour during both the response and recovery phases of emergencies. While the expectation of external assistance in times of crisis may be lower the more remote the location, the sector and wider community maintain a responsibility to provide assistance to these communities at such times. The State Emergency Relief and Recovery Plan states that where communities are isolated as a result of an emergency, control agencies have a role to support the delivery of relief services through outreach activities. Beyond this, there are no procedures or policies around planning for or responding to ‘isolation’. Instead, the focus of emergency management planning is on ‘how and when to leave’.