Scenario modelling for the assessment of national catastrophic disaster management capability / Geoscience Australia.

Highly Commended, Pre-disaster Category, National Significance, Safer Communities Awards 2005.

Includes bibliography (p. 8).

Four extreme event scenarios have been developed by GA to the benefit of many other emergency management related agencies across Australia. Natural hazard events regularly impact upon Australian communities, necessitating the response of emergency services. While our ability to manage more frequent and less severe events is widely recognised, our ability to cope nationally with very rare but credible events of great consequence is unclear. Limitation of knowledge was highlighted by the Boxing Day tsunami which had overwhelming impact upon 11 Indian Ocean nations. The Australian Emergency Management Committee established the Catastrophic Disaster Emergency Management Capability Working Group to, in part, review national capability against severe yet credible benchmark scenario consequences. GA led the development of a suite of four extreme event scenarios - cyclone, earthquake, pandemic flu and a tsunami event - that were central to the deliberations of the working group. The process involved the co-ordination of collaborative contributions from several research agencies to highly constrained timelines. Attempts were made to capture the magnitude of emergency management logistics by considering the impact upon a broad range of infrastructure and resident populations. The final scenarios have served to ensure that the consequences against which national capability is measured are credible and identify the level of severity that could be experienced. Finally these scenarios have enabled the working group to more fully explore the range of capabilities required to respond to and recover from extreme events of this type and will lead to a series of recommendations aimed at addressing any identified capability issues and that will ultimately result in safer Australian communities.