How close do you have to be to learn the lesson? Fire burns!
Australia experiences a range of disasters, but during the prolonged drought, one of the most common and devastating natural disasters has been that of bushfires; even when floods were covering some parts of Australia, fire was destroying other areas. Does awareness of one’s level of risk make a difference to our preparedness to combat future fire risks? Or is it that we have to personally encounter a fire on our own doorstep before we take action to ensure that the next time it happens we know that we have done all we could to avert the fire danger? A larger study on rural residents’ responses (N = 713) to a survey on preparedness for, and experience of, bushfires was conducted a year after one of the worst bushfire seasons in Australia and after ongoing devastating grass, forest and fire storms in South East Queensland. A report on the descriptive data from that survey has been published elsewhere. The analyses presented here focus on risk, exposure, and experience factors relating to bushfire preparedness in rural areas with a bushfire history. This article focuses on South East Queensland (SEQ) where the authors have resided for many years. The bushfire season in SEQ is generally experienced in spring and summer (BOM, 13.09.07; http://www.bom.gov.au/inside/services_policy/fire_ag/bushfire/threat.htm).
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|Item Type:||Journal Article|
|Additional Information:||Copyright Kathryn Gow, Francine Pritchard and David Chant © 2008. The authors assign to the Australasian Journal of Disaster and Trauma Studies at Massey University a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The author/s also grant a non-exclusive licence to Massey University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the authors.|
|Keywords:||Bushfire exposure, Bushfire experience, Disaster preparedness, Southeast Queensland|
|Subjects:||Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification > PSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES (170000) > COGNITIVE SCIENCE (170200) > Decision Making (170202)
Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification > PSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES (170000) > PSYCHOLOGY (170100) > Social and Community Psychology (170113)
|Divisions:||Current > QUT Faculties and Divisions > Faculty of Health
Current > Schools > School of Psychology & Counselling
|Deposited On:||10 May 2009 23:49|
|Last Modified:||10 Aug 2011 13:32|
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