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On the days of extreme fire danger around Black Saturday 10 months ago the CFA website was frustrating people across Victoria by listing fires from across the State, from the most serious wildfires to small domestic fires, on the same Incident Summary page. It’s true that you could click the Region heading so all incidents in your region (still a vast area) would appear together, but as soon as you refreshed the page you’d be back to the view below.

After the revelations over CFA senior management incompetence and lack of information reaching people in high-risk areas, you’d think that on the top of the list of things to overhaul for this fire season would be the CFA website. Yet, on the first day of extreme fire danger, the Incident Summary and Warnings & Advice pages are down!!!

Which may leave some people resorting to Twitter for news on the wildfire on the Great Ocean Road.

If the CFA resource has gone down due to the volume of hits from concerned residents across Victoria that shows a truly shocking level of incompetence. That, after all, is the site’s purpose!

If all those vows that the likes of Black Saturday must never be allowed to occur again are to be anything other than empty rhetoric, the authorities are going to have to get with the program. Step No. 1: sack operational Chief Officer Russell Rees – the man who, on February 7th, didn’t even know there was a fire ecologist on-site making accurate maps projecting the movement of the fire heading for Marysville; the maps were never utilised. Co-ordinated Headquarters? Yeah, right!

Update: Well, after several hours, the Incident Summary page came back up late-pm and it’s the same mess of irrelevant, unsorted information: Region 14 structure, Region 24 false alarm, Region 8 ‘Other’, Region 22 structure. Do the CFA really think people are going to go to their website to see whether the house they’re in has a chip pan fire?!

The Great Ocean Road fire and many others were brought under control by the excellent work of the CFA volunteers, who do their best in the face of normally unseen frustration with the senior management.