08/12/2025
🔥⏱️ Did You Know About ... The Deadly Delay? Time vs Fire vs You Get A Warning ⏳🔥
We need to have another brutally honest conversation, this time about time.
Many people believe that if a bushfire threatens their home, their phone will buzz with a warning in plenty of time to jump in their car and leave (read our other posts to see why this is a deadly decision 🚗💀) or start their pumps and get ready to defend (and yep, we have a whole other post about why this is a deadly decision in Extreme or Catastrophic conditions ⚠️🔥).
⛔⏱️ Let's talk about the deadly delay though.
Here is the reality of the timeline:
🕒 THE CLOCK AND FIRE STARTS:
📍 Discovery:
The time it takes for someone to actually see the smoke or fire and call 000.
⏳ Answer the Call:
The time it takes to answer the call. If there are already other large fires raging across the landscape, impacting homes and towns, there may be dozens or more people calling for help. It might take time until the call can be answered.
📞 Operator:
The time it takes for the caller to speak to the operator, explain the situation, and provide an accurate location.
🗺️ Mapping:
The time it takes the operator to pinpoint that specific location on a map to determine exactly which brigades need to respond.
📢 Dispatch:
The time it takes to page the brigade the fires location and to respond.
⚠️ EDIT & NOTE: Somewhere around here if you have the VicEmergency App installed you may get a notification of a fire in your area if you have a watch zone set, however this is dependent on what we discuss below, on where the caller said the fire is. Which could be incorrect. You still won't get a warning message yet though.
🚒 Response:
The time it takes volunteers to drop what they are doing, get to the station, gear up, and get the truck on the road. Now, on Extreme or Catastrophic days, many brigades do have crews already on station, ready to roll. While it is amazing that volunteers leave their own families to do this 🙏❤️, let's be realistic about the math: even if the truck leaves immediately, it might only save 10 minutes in this entire complex timeline. It is not a magic fix for the other delays.
🛣️ Travel:
Ask yourself: how far are you from your local CFA station? It could take 30 minutes or more for a heavy fire truck to navigate narrow, winding, hilly roads. The roads may be traffic or smoke filled, there may be wildlife and stock on the road, trees and powerlines down and a million other things that can delay response. And this also relies on us knowing exactly where to go. In the panic of the moment, callers often give wrong locations.
⛰️ Crews might be searching on the wrong road, a hill or two away from the flames, on the completely other side of town, or sometimes not even in the correct town.
🚗💥🚒 We also face the constant danger of turning a blind corner and coming head-on with a resident who is in a mad dash to flee — or worse, turning a corner and finding ourselves instantly trapped in the fire. Fire trucks don't turn around on a dime.
And this if the crews can even get there at all.
📡 Intel Relay:
The time it takes the crew on scene to assess the threat and radio back to FireCom. This in itself can present massive delays. On bad days, radio dispatch operators are dealing with huge areas and maybe multiple fires.
There may be 20, 30, 50, even hundreds of fire trucks coming up on the radio trying to get instructions, get more information themselves or provide sit-reps.
If crews can't get a word in, crews can't even get there, then we or VicEmergency can't even get the warning process started. Critically, getting an accurate warning to you depends on us knowing exactly where the fire is. If there is no truck on scene yet, or crews are already fighting another fire, we are flying blind. You can add even more time before accurate info goes up the chain.
📝 The Process:
The time it takes the person tasked with issuing the warning to map who and where the warning needs to go, they need to try and determine the fire's size and direction, draft the warning message text, double-check accuracy, and finally push the send button.
There are multiple checks for a reason — the warnings need to be as accurate as possible with the limited information available in that initial response.
📲 Delivery:
The time it takes for the warning to hit your phone.
👀 Action:
The time it takes you to notice, then read it and realise what it means.
⏳ Add all that up and it could be 30 minutes or more before your phone goes ding with a warning message.
⚠️ THE SYSTEM OVERLOAD FACTOR ⚠️
On Extreme or Catastrophic days, zoom out for a second. Look at the big picture.
There could be hundreds of fires burning across the state.
Crews are stretched thin.
The Incident Control Centres (ICC) and State Control Centre (SCC) are working frantically in the background, trying hear what's said on the radio, trying to radio or ring crews to get information, on what could a dozen different fires at once. Trying get multiple different warnings for multiple areas out at once.
🐢⛔ This can jam the gears and delay everything even more.
🌪️🔥 And here is a hard reality that no one wants to hear, but you need to know:
🥇 Prioritisation.
If resources are overwhelmed, there are fires all over the state, then decisions have to be made.
A few houses along a dirt road might not take precedence over getting out a warning for an entire town about to be impacted by an already raging firestorm 100km down the road — or even getting help to you at all.
It can sound harsh, but it is the reality of what we are talking about here:
The worst of the worst conditions.
The type of days that may get written about in history. 📖
🔢 THE MATH DOESN'T WORK
Now, let's now compare that timeline above to the timeline of a fire in catastrophic conditions.
⏱️💀🔥 We have warned you before that lives can be lost within 20 minutes of ignition. This is not theoretical.
🚪💥 In one heartbreaking real-world example we use often, a fire started kilometres away from a property. By the time the couple inside saw the smoke and the front approaching, the window to defend or flee had already slammed shut.
They were forced to take shelter inside.
🏚️🔥 Within 15 to 20 minutes of the very first spark, the wind-driven flames didn't just ignite their home — the sheer intensity caused the structure to fail completely.
The building collapsed on top of them almost immediately. 💔
The house was on the ground before a warning could have saved them.
They never came out.
⛔ If the warning system takes 30 minutes, but the fire takes 15 minutes to kill you, the math does not work in your favour.
📱🔔 By the time your phone finally dings with a warning message:
🔥 The fire front may already be on your doorstep.
🔥 You are now fighting for your life, not evacuating or defending.
🔥 A fight history tells us, over and over again, that you will likely lose.
🔥 The roads you planned to escape on may be blocked by traffic, fallen trees, or powerlines.
🔥 And regarding help: you could be waiting on backup from towns 30+ minutes or hours away — but that backup might not even arrive. Again, please go back and read our post on this subject.
We do our absolute best.
We work as fast as humanly possible to get warnings out.
But at times, we simply just cannot beat the physics of a catastrophic fire(s).
📵 Do not bet your life on your phone going ding.
We say this until our voices hurt and our keyboards wear out:
👉 Leaving early is the only guaranteed way not to die.
👉 Have a plan.
👉 Leave before you think you need to.
👉 Leave before a fire even starts. 🏃♂️🔥🏡
We encourage you to go back and read our other in-depth posts about why we keep saying the same things over and over. We are trying to tell realistically what is likely to happen in the conditions these posts are about. Because this knowledge helps you make decisions that may save your life — even before a fire has started. 📚❤️🔥
