Posts by Matthew Poole
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Republished: The CTV collapse…, in reply to Ross Mason,
If my understanding about the Fire Service is right, then as any situation develops and as each next highest brass arrives they get to be the one to say “Go”.
Kinda. There is no obligation on any particular senior officer to take over just because they're the highest-ranked officer on the scene. Junior officers don't get experience and mentoring if they get flicked as soon as someone senior arrives; even in an event like this, there are considerations beyond seniority as to who's going to be Incident Controller. In the case of these 13, as Andre said they're all of similar rank, all long-term career fire fighters with vaguely similar levels of experience and training. They needed to decide who should take charge at a scene (and there were multiple scenes, don't forget), who should represent NZFS at the regional emergency management level, who should be getting on a plane to Wellington, and who should be getting some rest so they can step in effectively in 12 hours' time when the current bosses need relief; all on top of being residents in a city that's now heavily damaged with hundreds dead. We pay them to be good emergency managers, but they're still humans.
-
Hard News: Republished: The CTV collapse…, in reply to Mark Montgomery,
What I cannot fathom is why none of the various NZ Fire Service executive officers who turned up at the CTV collapse took charge. I
Probably assumed (hoped might be a better word) that someone else had done it already, because someone else had to have done it already. Wouldn't be the first time.
Is anything being done around having the Comms Centres take a more assertive role with getting senior officers to establish a proper ICP?A key difference I can see between this and a smaller incident is that a smaller incident has a defined response, defined OICs, defined perimeter, etc etc. You know, with certainty, who's responded, who's in charge now, who to talk to to determine if a change of incident controller is required. Unless the first-arriving appliances at CTV set up a clear command structure, and it sounds like they didn't really, the incoming chiefs would have been left wondering which indian they needed to take control from. Which is not an excuse for not figuring it out, but it's easy to see how a significant deviation from "the norm" would throw officers used to things being done "this way" because they're always done "this way".
-
Hard News: Republished: The CTV collapse…, in reply to WaterDragon,
Certainly not holding my breath. There’s no being less likely to say "sorry" than a government department that’s been found to have buggered up royally.
-
Liz, it’s great that you feel able to be all “armchair general” about this, and far be it from me to suggest that you’re actually woefully under-qualified to hold such opinions, but emergency services very, very rarely come away from such massive events to showers of glory.
FDNY fucked-up royally in their command of the WTC response, and in the years leading up thereto, and lost many more fire fighters than necessary in the collapse. The accolades and hero-worship occlude the reality that although many of the FDNY deaths in Tower 2 were pretty much inevitable (command functions should not have been located in the lobby of the burning building and immediate vicinity) the deaths in Tower 1 were mostly very avoidable if repeated requests over many years to deal with radio reception problems had been paid heed.Consider this: in all of NZ there are somewhere around 10k fire fighters. Somewhere around 1400 are paid (aka career) staff, the rest are volunteers. NZ Fire Service has roughly 150 staff, all career, who are attached (as a secondary duty, they're primarily just fire fighters) to the three Urban Search and Rescue task forces based in Palmerston North (TF1), Christchurch (TF2), and Auckland (TF3). That number are mostly operational staff, not senior officers. It is those small number of men (pretty sure they’re all male, the number of career females in bunker gear in NZFS is tiny) who have the training in dealing with mind-blowingly-enormous incidents of the scale of 22/2. The officers attached to the TF’s have training too, but they’re a smaller number again.
Managing a massive, whole-of-region multiple-site collapse incident is decidedly non-trivial. Doing it with mere dozens of paid fire fighters and not all that many more volunteers in the initial period, across agencies, is a different set of skills to what fire officers here normally deal with. Even a large fire that encompasses a few buildings in a block is different. It’s contained, you can visualise the scope, you can marshal resources to one location and put them all to work on one task. Hell, a single collapsed city block is a pretty easy management task. Demanding, but straightforward for the same reasons that a whole city block ablaze is straightforward: one location onto which you can focus all your resources. Consider this, too: a USAR heavy task force – and ours are not yet equipped to the international “heavy” standard – is only meant to be dealing with one collapsed multi-storey building; so NZ only has the internal capacity to cope with three collapsed buildings simultaneously, and in reality CTV alone could have used two TFs.Should the NZFS senior officers in Christchurch on the day have responded more efficiently and expeditiously? Absolutely. Is it completely inexcusable and inexplicable that they did not? No, I don’t think it is. The further back you are from a true disaster, the easier it is to be overwhelmed by the scale. The peons on the rubble pile don’t have that luxury, they’re staring at bricks and beams and bodies and that’s got all their focus. All the finest training in the world is only as good as the regularity of its exercise and the quality of the structure into which it is deployed. It was obvious after Pike River that there are holes in how complex multi-agency incidents are handled, and that structure (Coordinated Incident Management System, or CIMS) had not, and has not yet, had the review that it needs to really scale well for a big incident with lots of people joining the party. Most fire officers will never deal with a collapse more serious or complex than a house that’s been knocked off its pilings. Many will never even deal with that. Without regular exercising to maintain mental currency in dealing with not just one big building that’s come down but a whole city littered with collapsed buildings, no level of training is sufficient. Exercising to that scale when it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event is hard to justify, especially when smaller, less-complex incidents happen regularly and, in theory, “the system” scales to any size and complexity of incident.
-
Hard News: Republished: The CTV collapse…, in reply to Sue,
Is there a legal reason why the fire service won’t or can’t just say ‘we are sorry’
In this litigious age, while the Coroner still hasn't reported on whether or not the (in)actions of NZFS contributed to the deaths of people in the CTV building, it would be a very risky thing to say. "Ah, that's an admission of fault" would say the lawyers.
Now that the Coroner has reported, however, I would hope something will be forthcoming. -
on the basis that it was a breach of the service’s media policy.
Not defending the policy, which I consider to be an over-reach by an agency that is bound by the Bill of Rights Act’s provisions on freedom of expression, but it is quite clear that this posting is a breach since it’s so very definitely "incident related information".
Given that NZFS brass in Christchurch came out of the inquest with very muddy faces, one would have thought they’d have been exercising some valorous discretion. -
Hard News: Polls: news you can own, in reply to Russell Brown,
Figured as much, but it was good for a cheap laugh.
-
the question of who gets to form a government in December
(my emphasis)
You really think Winnie's going to string everyone along for three months? :P
I guess it's not without precedent. -
The Press Council having more say over where compelled notices of correction/retraction are published is a great development. No more hiding the retraction in two column inches on A8 below the fold when the original sin was the whole front page.
-
Muse: Guilt By Association Copy, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
Whether you then think collecting WW2 artefacts in general or Nazi ones in particular is problematic is a different question.
Dotcom is also in the position of being a German individual who's living in a country where it's entirely legal to trade in Nazi artifacts. In Germany, it's a crime. His BF2 fanaticism is well-known, so being interested in owning such historical pieces is entirely in keeping with his other interests.