Episode 257: Engaging Communities in the Recovery and Reconstruction Process with Amanda Leck and Kristie Clarke

Episode notes

What’s the most important thing to focus on during disaster management?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

In this episode:

Insights on disaster resilience and the challenges of reconstruction in New South Wales

The importance of community engagement and communication during recovery efforts

Why strategic risk reduction measures are essential

Hear from Amanda Leck - the Head of Adaptation, Mitigation and Reconstruction at NSW Reconstruction Authority - and Kristie Clarke - the Executive Director for the Northern Rivers Adaptation .

Amanda and Kristie talk about their experiences in disaster resilience and reconstruction efforts in New South Wales, Australia. They dive into the increasing frequency and impact of natural disasters and emphasize the need for strategic mitigation and risk reduction measures to protect communities. A major focus is the importance of engaging with communities throughout the recovery process, ensuring that their needs remain at the forefront.

Amanda and Kristie also highlight the challenges of building in high-risk areas and how the Institute of Fire Engineers supports education and professional development to address these issues. They stress that leadership at every level is critical to making meaningful progress in disaster risk reduction.

So take a listen to hear what they have to share!

Episode Resources:

AFAC25 Conference

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn

Chapters

1. 0:00 Intro from the IFE booth at AFAC 2024
2. 0:56 Amanda Leck and Kristie Clarke join
3. 1:15 Their roles in reconstruction and recovery
4. 2:48 The Northern Rivers flood and relocation program
5. 3:30 Lessons from February 2022
6. 4:36 Taking the lessons statewide
7. 5:35 What engaging the community really means
8. 7:33 Cup of tea conversations
9. 8:38 Homes, attachment and the recovery journey
10. 9:06 Building responsibly in high-risk areas
11. 11:57 What the IFE means to them
12. 13:41 Final words: community at the center
13. 14:25 Leadership at every level
14. 15:23 Wrap

Questions answered in this episode

What is the Resilient Homes program in New South Wales?

Amanda Leck says it is a relocation program that moves people off floodplains in high-risk areas. Kristie Clarke says it started in the Northern Rivers after the devastating February 2022 flood. Amanda Leck says it is now being rolled out to the central west, modified based on lessons learned and community feedback.

Hear it at 7:33

How does the New South Wales Reconstruction Authority engage with communities?

Kristie Clarke describes engagement at multiple levels: one-on-one conversations in homes, working with community groups, and partnering with local councils. Amanda Leck adds that it includes understanding what communities need for preparedness, warnings, and recovery, and that engagement is core to operations, not an add-on.

Hear it at 7:33

What lessons were learned from the February 2022 Northern Rivers flood?

Kristie Clarke says ongoing communication with the community and across government was a major lesson, as well as keeping community at the center and engaging them early in the recovery and reconstruction process. Amanda Leck notes they modified the program for the central west based on what did not meet community expectations in the Northern Rivers.

Hear it at 3:48

How does Australia address bushfire risk in building standards?

Amanda Leck says Australia has had good standards for building in bushfire prone areas for some time, requiring people to understand the bushfire attack level for their site and implement resilience measures. Fire engineers calculate heat load, radiant heat, and ember impacts to determine if a house can survive a bushfire front.

Hear it at 9:47

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 257 transcript

Engaging Communities in the Recovery and Reconstruction Process with Amanda Leck and Kristie Clarke

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Amanda Leck, Kristie Clarke

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to a mini Smart Firefighting podcast series, recorded live at the Institute of Fire Engineers booth during the 2024 AFAC Show Down Under in Sydney, Australia. Throughout these conversations, we dive into critical issues like fire safety, emerging technologies, diversity in the fire service, and innovative solutions for emergency response. these fascinating insights from leaders around the world on how we can build a safer and more resilient future. Amanda Leck, the head of adaptation mitigation and reconstruction at New South Wales, and Kristie Clarke, the executive director at Northern Rivers Adaptation, share insights of disaster resilience and reconstruction efforts in New South Wales. They explore the importance of community engagement, strategic risk reduction, and the challenges of building in high-risk areas. We are live back at the AFAC show floor alongside Amanda Leck and Christine Clark. Amanda and Christine, how are you both doing?

[1:04] Amanda Leck: Very well, thank you very much. Enjoying the conference. Yeah, having a great few days learning a lot about the disaster resilience measures that are being undertaken across Australia and having a really good time.

[1:15] Kevin Sofen: Well, one thing that I think America and Australia and many places around the world all have in common is dealing with disasters seems like that is something that is we are not immune from. You both are involved in different aspects of reconstruction and recovery and have been involved with some of that recently within Australia. Tell me both a little bit more about both your roles what you do and yeah let's start there.

[1:38] Amanda Leck: Well I'm the head of adaptation mitigation and reconstruction with the New South Wales Reconstruction Authority and in that capacity. I'm responsible for leading a strategic way that we can mitigate risk for our community. So in New South Wales, like most of Australia, but also internationally, we're seeing greater natural hazard emergencies and disasters. So we're seeing huge floods, we're seeing cyclones, we're seeing bushfires, and those natural disasters are leading to greater and greater impacts on our communities. So we're seeing more people losing their homes. We're seeing communities devastated by the impacts of those natural hazards and this is only increasing. So we're seeing the frequency of these events increasing and we're seeing them greater scale, greater scope. We're seeing the impacts of concurrent disasters on our communities. And in particular, I'll hand over to Kristie Clarke shortly, but in particular in the Northern Rivers where we saw the most devastating flood event ever happen in Australia in February of 2022.

[2:48] Kristie Clarke: Thanks so much. So my role is the Executive Director of the Northern Rivers Adaptation Division, as Amanda said, and so we're leading a number of significant initiatives to help build back and recover, as Amanda said, post the February 2022 flood. So there's a number of the significant investment in the region, almost $7 billion, which is related to the reconstruction, but we're also have a targeted program, the largest in Australia to relocation program. So removing people from high risk areas in flood plains across the Northern rivers and moving them to flood free land.

[3:25] Kevin Sofen: And excuse me for my bad handwriting, I called you Christine, it's Christine.

[3:28] Kristie Clarke: That's okay.

[3:29] Kevin Sofen: So I apologize. Yeah, but so February, 2022, I'd love to know from that date, kind of looking back on A, what went wrong and B, what are some now maybe lessons learned on whether something went wrong or right, what are we doing different to build back not the same but build back better and smarter.

[3:48] Kristie Clarke: Yeah, look, I think there's a whole range of lessons that have been learned. I think in particular, a challenge that we're continuing to manage as an organization is our communications both across government and out to the community so that they're aware of the work that's underway, understand the impacts of them and to their community directly, but also at a personal level. I think ongoing communications has definitely been a lesson that we have learned and continue to learn from. I think keeping community at the centre of the work that we're doing and really having them engaged often and as early through the recovery and reconstruction process as possible, that we're working in partnership at a local level, not just with but with councils, across government agencies and other partners to deliver the scale of work that we have underway.

[4:36] Amanda Leck: I think from my perspective is taking what occurred in the Northern Rivers and the work we're doing there and as Kristie said, learning those lessons and making sure that the New South Wales state government policy reflects what we've learned from our experiences in the Northern Rivers. So the program Kristie spoke to where we're relocating people off floodplains through the Resilient Homes program. We're now rolling that program out into the central west where there was devastating floods in Eugowra. And we've learned a lot from our experiences in the Northern Rivers. And so we've modified the program. We've consulted deeply with communities in the central west to understand how they've experienced the program, how we can do it better, how we can make sure that some of the things that happened in the Northern Rivers that didn't really meet community expectation, didn't really engage and involve community in the program design in the first instance. We're trying to ensure that we're doing that in the central west of the state.

[5:35] Kevin Sofen: And both of you mentioned the dynamic of engaging with the community. Explain that deeper. What does that mean to actually engage with the community? Is that going door to door and knocking and having conversations and having a cup of tea and talking about what went wrong? How do we improve this? What is that like?

[5:52] Amanda Leck: Look, all of those things, And certainly Kristie will speak to her cup of tea at the kitchen table with many Northern Rivers residents. But my background is in community development and community engagement around disaster preparedness and disaster management. We know that communities are critical stakeholders. So we need to learn from communities about what works for them. We need to understand where they're at in terms of their understanding of hazard and risk, actions they can take at a local level. So there's lots that homeowners and householders can do at a local level to enhance the preparedness of their families, school communities and the like. And so we need to build that into how we actually operate so that it's not just a nice to do or an add on but it's core to everything we do. So that could be at that household level, it can be at the community scale where we engage with community groups that are active in managing their own recovery. It can be the work we do with local councils, which are the elected leadership in the region, to, from my perspective, I'm engaging across government. So across policy makers, across government, be that with colleagues working in environment or education or health, to make sure that we're engaging, understanding what communities need from us so that they can both be prepared, they can understand how to get warnings during impending emergencies or disasters, and then how we work with them through that relief and recovery stage. But Kristie has a lot of experience doing this with local community members. So I'll hand over to her.

[7:33] Kristie Clarke: Thanks, Amanda. Look, it's funny that you raised the cup of tea because I feel like at a local and personal level, we do a lot of that with community members and being in their homes, understanding one, where they're at, the knowledge that they have of our programs, what support and assistance that they need. But as Amanda said, working collectively with councils and other community groups around future preparedness and understanding of future risk in the region is equally as important. I think probably where people are at in the Northern Rivers at this point in time, they're most interested in our programs, what they have on offer and are available to the community. But also there's a number of lessons that we've learned as we've been rolling out the programs and policy changes we've had to make or we have made based on community feedback so that the program is not just a processing program to relocate people, but it's actually considering, well, housing shortages in the region, making occupancy arrangements available. So there's been a lot of tailoring that we've done based on those cup of tea discussions that you mentioned.

[8:38] Kevin Sofen: Thank you for that context. I think it's important to remember that we are human dealing with other humans and we're talking about our homes and where we grew up and there's our houses and our photos and it's all very emotional.

[8:50] Kristie Clarke: Long attachment. I think there's a long attachment and, you know, I was born in Lismore. I have a long generational attachment to the Northern rivers and to Lismore in particular. So I think, yeah, you need to actually acknowledge that and acknowledge where people are at in terms of their recovery journey as well.

[9:06] Kevin Sofen: And so that's a difficult next step in terms of this challenge of where humans are, you know, potentially moving to places and living the places and that maybe aren't fully suited for human life, particularly when I know within America, we talk a lot about humans moving into the WUI environment and living in places that maybe aren't the best, but we architect in a way where we've got, just build homes and try and make it seem like it's not a big deal, but kind of how are you approaching that dynamic of like building in a smart way and building responsibly to where you can, we're trying to prevent and mitigate from it just happening in the same way it happened in the past?

[9:47] Amanda Leck: Yeah, so from a bushfire perspective, certainly we are seeing those interface fires like you're seeing in the United States and in Canada. And, you know, for a long time, we have had good standards. around building a bushfire prone area. So they require people to understand the bushfire attack level for their housing site, you know, their block of land or whatever it might be, and then that then leads to them having to implement certain resilience measures in how they build their homes so that they can better be protected from, we call them bushfires, you call them wildfires, but they're the same sort of fire. They're the fire that comes in from, you know, maybe a sort of a landscape that is, you know, a bush landscape or a landscape of grasslands and then comes into that area where there are urban dwellings and it is those homes that are on that fringe or interface location that have the greatest risk. And so we've done a lot of work in Australia around making sure we have appropriate building standards and land use standards around that. There's more work to be done, but we've had some pretty big fires in Australia in the last 20 years, that have led to those standards being enhanced and the resilience of our built form increasing. I think that is where fire engineering comes in because fire engineers do all those calculations around heat load and radiant heat and embers and how they impact on the built form. It's all of those considerations that determine whether the building, the house, is able to sustained the passage of that bushfire and remained standing after the fire front has gone through. So there has been a lot of work done in Australia, there's a lot more to do, and we certainly collaborate with our colleagues in the US and Canada around some of the work that's being done in your country because I think we need to continue to learn from each other, as again we see the impacts of climate change, a warming world, greater fires of greater magnitude and scale than we'd seen before.

[11:57] Kevin Sofen: And we're sitting here in this Institute of Fire Engineers' little booth. We got some wonderful Tim Tams, which, by the way, feel free to take one if you're so inclined. But this Institute of Fire Engineers' dynamic of, I'd love to know from both of you, sort of, what is the IFE in your world and how are you working and collaborating with the IFE?

[12:16] Amanda Leck: Look, not directly from the Reconstruction Authority perspective, but certainly from a sector perspective, the IFE has a real role internationally and in Australia around education. So education and continuing professional development, which is what the IFE's role at the conference is critical and I think that applies across the board to all the work that we're doing. We need to continue to learn, to educate our people. We have new people coming into the sector who may not have been involved before and they need to understand some of what we've learnt previously and I think that applies whether you're talking about flooding, whether you're talking about cyclone, whether you're talking about bushfire, whether you're talking about urban fire. There is always a requirement of all of us in the sector to continue to learn, to share what we know and to maintain our professional standards and that's what IFE does so well.

[13:12] Kristie Clarke: Look, I just, I think it's an avenue of stakeholders that then enables the Reconstruction Authority to have reach about educating and informing the community more broadly about the work that's underway, but also those connected channels, you know, also information about, you know, future hazards, risk reduction that the Reconstruction Authority is, you know, embedding and working closely with communities. The IFE is a, is an avenue for us to be able to enhance and expand our reach. Yeah.

[13:41] Kevin Sofen: Well, I'm sure grateful for IFE for a lot of fronts, especially with just being able to be here and talk with both of you about your expertise and the work that you're doing, but one thing to wrap us up here. I'd love to know if there is a quote or words of wisdom that either you live by or within your organization that you follow that you could share with us here today.

[13:59] Kristie Clarke: Look, I'll go first. I think community at the center of what we're doing. I find it interesting that you raised the cup of tea scenario because, to be honest, that is where I start with our team in the Northern Rivers. Have we had a cup of tea? And that can apply to the community group, the council that we're going to meet with. Is it a homeowner one-on-one? So I think keeping community and their needs at the centre of everything we're doing is critical.

[14:25] Amanda Leck: Something I like to think about is leadership at every level. I think sometimes people look to leaders to have all the answers and we know that's not true. So we know that a person in a community who might be the footy coach or the netball coach is a leader in their community. The school teacher is a leader within that school community. we have elected leadership. And I just think that we all have a leadership role to play in really being able to understand the challenges that we face as a nation, as a global community around disaster risk reduction and how we're going to get there, because we know that we want communities to be safe and thriving into the future. And so we have to work hard and together to mitigate, but it's not the leaders, the traditional leaders that are responsible for that. It is all of us showing leadership in everything that we do. So leadership at every level.

[15:23] Kevin Sofen: Well said. Well, I would love nothing more than to continue to have a cup of tea and some Tim Tams with both of you in the future. I really appreciate what you're doing for the Australian and the World Fire Service and keep up the great work.

[15:35] Amanda Leck: Thanks very much. Thanks for having us. Really appreciate it.

[15:39] Kevin Sofen: Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode recorded alongside the Institute of Fire Engineers during the AFAC Show. If you found value in the conversation or learned something new, we'd love to hear from you. Reach out, share your thoughts, and let's keep the discussion going on how we can shape the future of smart firefighting.