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The State of Victoria is a signatory to a variety of mutual aid arrangements to support partner agencies both interstate and internationally, during times of emergency.
The Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP), Parks Victoria, Melbourne Water, and VicForests, as Forest Fire Management Victoria (FFMVic), contribute to an overall Victorian deployment group when requests are made.
Notwithstanding, DELWP, and its FFMVic partners, has legislative obligations to ensure, as far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of our workforce including whilst deployed interstate and internationally under the control of partner agencies.
Working in strange landscapes with different people, systems, practices and equipment present a range of heightened risks for FFMVic personnel. Additionally, deployments frequently transpire when the requesting state / country has been managing protracted and large-scale events associated with widespread natural disasters and impacts on local communities.
Sound and comprehensive deployment planning and processes are the foundations to begin to mitigate those increased risks. Additionally, it has been recognised that planning for the wellbeing and safety of our staff extends well beyond the deployment window.
High level systems for managing emergencies fall under the Australasian Interservice Incident Management System (AIIMS). This system is nationally recognised and relatively consistent across Australia.
Yet, for on-ground management, control agencies have agency-specific safety systems, operational protocols, plant, equipment and tactics. These are best reviewed in advance of a specific deployment request to ensure that they are understood and are of an acceptable standard. If FFMVic believe them to be insufficient, additional mitigations and controls may need to be considered to ensure FFMVic staff are deployed into a safe workplace.
This paper presents a risk based approach and methodology to comparing partner agencies’ safety systems. FFMVic has already carried out comparisons with a range of partner agencies and high-level learnings from these reviews will be presented.