Canberra fire storm report.

The Australian Capital Territory coroner, Maria Doogan has handed down her report on the fire storm that hit Canberra on January 18, 2003, resulting in the loss of over five hundred homes and the death of four people.
The report is scathing. Days ahead of this calamity lightning strikes resulted in several fires in the mixture of grazing land and pine forests that surrounded the capital. Amazingly, the Canberra Emergency Services Bureau ( ESB ) tended to ignore them despite evidence that they were easily containable at that stage.
As time passed the weather conditions deteriorated and senior fire services voiced concern that these fires would linkup and would be capable of forming an unstoppable firestorm if predicted temperatures and wind patterns developed. It seems that the ESB simply ignored this advice - and did nothing.
The coroner was critical of the fact that at no stage were the residents of Canberra warned that a dangerous situation existed. People went shopping or went to work oblivious that danger was on their doorstep. Their first indication of trouble was in the early afternoon when the fire storm roared into town and engulfed whole suburbs of the capital.
Local opinion sheeted home the blame to the man at the top - ACT chief minister Jon Stanhope. There have been calls for his resignation - but in the usual political manner he has rejected this criticism and refuses to step down.
Four years later the capital is slowly recovering, but questions remain as to what has changed at the USB - and whether the political bosses have learned anything from the disaster !