Standards Australia is not part of government; we do not make laws or regulations.
Only one member of the team survived. Apart from this tragedy a number of homes were lost to the fire and homeowners sued the Arizona State Forestry Division (ASFD) claiming that the Division ‘negligently failed to protect them from harm that resulted from the Fire’.
Some legislation will say that a government authority is an entity capable of being sued in its own name; others do not. Where it does not then the appropriate defendant is the state and we’ve seen that with, for example, litigation from the Canberra fires where the defendant was the State of NSW, not the NSW Rural Fire Service. The finding that the ASFD could not be sued was not really the issue; that just directed focus on whether or not the State of Arizona, rather than the Forestry Division was negligent.
The plaintiffs also alleged negligence because they relied upon the State to give notice to evacuate. This case failed as they could not point to any ‘undertaking’ by the state to deliver an evacuation warning nor could they point to any law that would impose a legal duty upon the state to do so.
the ‘Plaintiffs urge that they could have taken “special emergency measures” (e.g., trimming vegetation, hosing down buildings and vehicles)’ but they did not. They did not claim that they relied on the state to do those tasks for them, but they relied on the state to effectively fight the fire. His Honour dismissed this claim saying ‘Clearly, remedial fire prevention acts are not alternatives for the act undertaken by the State’.
In essence it was not open, or reasonable, for the plaintiffs to say ‘we didn’t have to do anything to protect ourselves when we could have taken simple measures, because we expected the fire service to stop the fire before it got here’. I suspect that aspect of the ruling would be encouraging for those actively encouraging home owners in Australia to develop their own fire plan and develop their own resilience.
‘Abnormally dangerous doctrine’
The plaintiffs relied on this doctrine. As an Australian lawyer.‘the rule in Rylands v Fletcher’ (referring to Rylands v Fletcher (1868) LR 3 HL 330). That rule imposed strict liability (that is liability without proof of negligence) if a defendant brought something dangerous onto his or her land and it escaped.
I would infer that the ‘abnormally dangerous doctrine’ says that if you are engaged in some abnormally dangerous activity you are liable for any harm caused, regardless of the care taken to avoid that harm. Following the decision in Burnie Port Authority v General Jones (1994) 179 CLR 520, which said that the rule in Rylands v Fletcher is no longer law in Australia, that doctrine probably does not apply here, if it ever did.
Regardless of the doctrine’s application in Australia, Judge Gama ruled it had no application in this case as the defendant was not engaged in an abnormally dangerous activity. The state was engaged in the activity of firefighting and it was the fire that caused the damage to the plaintiffs so even if firefighting is an abnormally dangerous activity, it is not what caused the plaintiffs’ losses and the doctrine could have no application.
https://emergencylaw.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/arizona-state-fire-department-not-liable-to-homeowners-for-property-lost-in-the-yarnell-fire-2013/