Integrating different services in an emergency

Lessons to be learned from the sydney hailstorm. Keys, C. (2000) presented at the Emergencies 2000 Conference, Sydney, 2000

Emergency management is a team game. This means that it requires teamwork, and the problems of integrating players from different organisations and cultures and operating under different management systems must be faced if this teamwork is to be achieved. Without the members of different agencies working together, effective responses to situations involving serious threats to life as well as damage to property and facilities on a large scale will not be possible.

This paper examines some of the issues involved in fostering teamwork in emergency management by integrating the efforts of different organisations. The particular context is the response to the extraordinarily severe hailstorm which hit Sydney's southern and eastern suburbs and the inner city on the evening of April 14 last year: this storm did damage estimated to be in the order of $2.2 billion (Emergency Management Australia, 1999, 9). In terms of numbers of insurance claims and the total insurance payout (now reckoned to be in the order of $1.7 billion) the event was the most costly disaster in Australia's history (Henri, 1999- 2000, 16), though a few other events including Cyclone Tracy, the Newcastle earthquake and the more severe droughts of recent decades were more damaging in terms of total economic costs incurred.

The hailstorm generated a massive, highly labour-intensive response over the three and a half weeks of the so-called 'emergency phase' of the response, and the work of placing and replacing tarpaulins over damaged roofs and carrying out permanent repairs continued at a high level for months thereafter. Indeed, almost a year after the storm the permanent repairs have still not been completed. The early weeks of the response involved many agencies and organisations - local, state and federal, paid and volunteer, public sector and private. It was one the largest and most complex emergency response operations ever mounted in Australia, and it demonstrated better than most storm-related operations the importance of ensuring that effective integration of the efforts of many players is achieved.

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