Interoperability: the key to emergency first-responder effectiveness
by Ernie Davitt, National Affairs Editor, ASM
Australia’s law enforcement and emergency service organisations have undergone a quiet revolution in terms of skills, equipment and capability, particularly in the area of emergency first response.
Adopting an ‘all hazards’ approach, State and Federal police as well as other emergency service first responders such as ambulance and fire brigades have to be trained and equipped to handle everything from terrorist incidents involving explosives to disease pandemics and catastrophic natural disasters.
The very nature of incidents requiring their attention has required an inter-dependence and interoperability, especially in the vital area of communications, between police and other emergency services including special forces elements of the Australian Defence Force.
Traditional frontline emergency first responders have to be able to work closely with a wide variety of other government and community organisations, including hospitals and health departments, quarantine, public utilities such as gas and electricity providers, the food and transport industries and the owners and operators of critical national infrastructure.
The make-up of the first response front line is also expanding. In the law enforcement sector, the role of Customs officers has widened as they are now called upon to perform ‘constabulary’ duties on an ever-expanding operational front.
An example is the need to train and arm 2000 of Australia’s 5000 frontline Customs officers to protect themselves at our borders where they have to combat everything from organised crime and illegal foreign fishing to drug smuggling and illegal entry.
It is not an unlikely scenario that Customs officers on land or at sea could find themselves in the centre of a major counter-terrorist operation as they go about their daily responsibilities.
An indication of the increasing dangers involved in modern law enforcement can be seen in the fact that most Australian police forces now use semi-automatic weapons and tazers or are actively considering doing so.
Just how is the interoperability and communications situation between Australia’s law enforcement and other emergency first responders?
Federal Attorney General, Robert McClelland, commenting about rapid response and recovery, said: “We have learnt from experience that preparation, communication and cooperation are fundamental to a quick recovery.”
He said the vast majority of hazards did not discriminate and knew nothing of State or national borders.
"Nor do they discriminate between government or private buildings, computer networks or employees, he said.”
Australia was a country which faced constant adversity.
Our harsh climate, geographic location and the sheer size of our continent all had an impact.
Mr McClelland told senior executives from the Trusted Information Sharing Network’s (TISN’s) critical national infrastructure industries in Sydney earlier this year:
“We only have to think of emergency situations, such as flood or bushfire, to realise that by the time the first news crew arrives to cover the event, our emergency services have already been well and truly mobilised.
“More than that, our preparation may well be able to assist emergency responders to predict likely events.”
He told the Safeguarding Australia conference in Canberra in July that the Government’s all-hazards approach was supported by measures to ensure community resilience ‘so we can deal with the consequences more readily and bounce back from disasters.’
“Community resilience is also an important part of achieving social inclusion.
"Helping your mates in times of crisis and supporting the community are key elements of the Australian way of life,” he said.
“We’re looking to strengthen both national partnerships for emergency management and a more hands on approach for communities to develop self-reliance.”
Work was underway to improve coordination at the Federal level and strengthen national partnerships with State and Territory governments, local governments, communities and the private sector.
An example of how disruptions to national infrastructure could affect the community could be seen in the accidental cutting of an Optus cable in Queensland recently.
This resulted in thousands of mobile phone customers, as well as banks, and other businesses going offline for hours.
“Money was lost, consumers were annoyed. There was frustration all round,” he said.
“It is a reminder of the importance of critical infrastructure protection in modern life.”
The Critical Infrastructure Protection Modelling and Analysis – or CIPMA – program was testament to the fact that owners and operators of critical infrastructure were prepared to ‘expose their own potential vulnerabilities in order to ensure a comprehensive and coordinated approach to protecting our national security.’
On the national and regional law enforcement front, the hand of the Australian Federal Police is being strengthened with provision of almost $200 million in the last Federal Budget to increase police numbers by another 500 over the next five years.
The AFP has grown so much in recent years it has to move into new headquarters in the Edmund Barton Building in Canberra’s Parliamentary precinct by 2009 after a former Defence building refurbished at ANZAC Park West at a cost of $19 million was found to be too small.
“The AFP has more than doubled in size in the past decade, placing tremendous pressure on its existing accommodation arrangements, so the move to the Edmund Barton Building is very timely,” said Home Affairs Minister, Bob Debus.
The Federal Government recently allocated $15 million to police and emergency services to buy cutting-edge equipment so they can better respond to disasters such as large scale building collapses or earthquakes.
Mr McClelland said that under the initiative not only will the equipment available nationally be upgraded, but it will also ensure consistency of response if a major disaster took place.
“The Australian public can be assured that the equipment to be purchased is state-of-the-art and capable of cutting through concrete in such a way as to better find and rescue trapped people,” he said.
“It will be held primarily by fire services in capital cities, ready for immediate deployment to an emergency site.”
The Federal Government’s contribution will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the State and Territory Governments, bringing the total funding for the project to $30 million.
The State and Territory investment will ensure that the necessary training is provided to fire and emergency services rescue personnel.
The grants have been made under the Urban Search and Rescue Capability Development Project, which is facilitated by Emergency Management Australia.
Former head of Emergency Management Australia, David Templeman, and Dr Anthony Bergin, from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, earlier this year jointly produced a Strategic Insight publication entitled Taking a Punch: Building a More Resilient Australia.
The paper recommends a number of specific measures to build a more resilient Australia including:
• amalgamating our national counter-terrorism and emergency management protection arrangements into one structure;
• creating a national community information and disaster warning system;
• factoring climate change into emergency planning;
• examining if disaster response by our military ought to be regarded as a core mission and what this might mean for selecting equipment and dispersal of military assets around Australia;
• undertaking realistic testing of our health assets in mass casualty disasters;
• drawing large business suppliers of goods and services much more into emergency planning;
• incorporating robustness and alternative supply options in design as part of the selection criteria for infrastructure projects by the Rudd Government’s new advisory body, Infrastructure Australia; and
• designating the ABC as the approved national emergency broadcaster with the ability to interrupt immediately any program to provide community advice on any aspect of a likely or resultant disaster.
The report says there hasn’t been enough effort put into engaging the Australian community on what Australians can do for themselves in the face of high consequence events like terrorism and extreme natural disasters.
They referred to two reports published last year which raised serious doubts about the health system’s capacity to handle a large mass casualty situation—something on the scale of the London bombings—70 deaths and 600 injuries, 400 hospitalised and needing surgery.
“If a large-scale influenza pandemic occurred in Australia and spread more quickly than anticipated then the surge capacity of our health response systems would almost certainly be rapidly overwhelmed,” they say.
“There’s a clear need for the health sector to have much greater integration in emergency management planning with a significant emphasis on volunteer health and community service based agencies to ensure integration occurs.
“And the physical assets in Australian hospitals don’t meet US hospital preparedness benchmarks for mass casualty incidents.
"In fact, we don’t have minimum disaster preparedness standards for our health system.
“At the same time as our community and individual preparedness to absorb negative impacts from unexpected dangers and to recover from these appears in decline, more Australians are shifting to sea-change localities, often with limited infrastructure response capacity to deal with increased storm and other weather extremes arising from climate change.”
The nature of post-disaster inquiries had aggravated problems in the way they had ‘taken a heavy toll on the parties under review.’
Inquiries have become very intrusive for operational first responders, including volunteers.
As a result, trained people who could undertake important roles as first responders aren’t taking up key posts because of the potential for public criticism and litigation, they said.
They talked about an estimated backlog of $150 billion in infrastructure development which would make it more difficult for Australia to bounce back from a catastrophic disaster.
The authors talked about the importance of having a single incident management system for command and control of emergencies, which could be adapted quickly from the routine to a nationally declared incident.
About the author: Ernie Davitt is the National Affairs Editor for Australian Security Magazine.