Floods, Flames, and Resilience: Coliban Water's Bushfire Response with Damian Wells

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcast, in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark and my guest today is Damian Wells, managing director at Coliban Water. And we're gonna be talking about the recent bushfires in Australia.
[00:00:20] Piers Clark: Damian, brilliant to have you with us.
[00:00:22] Damian Wells: Thanks for having me, Piers.
[00:00:23] Piers Clark: Now, we always start by delving into a little bit of background about our speaker. So tell me, what did you do before you became managing director at Coliban Water?
[00:00:31] Piers Clark: What's your history?
[00:00:33] Damian Wells: I actually grew up on an irrigation property, so I feel like I've always been chasing water in my life. When I went to uni, I studied geography, geology, biology, earth sciences, and water, and catchment management. And landed myself my first job in catchment management. So I had a lot of work in water quality, environmental flows, management of blue green algal blooms and all these kinds of things. Carved out quite a few years in that.
[00:00:58] Damian Wells: Also spent some time at Golburn Murray Water, which is Australia's largest rural water corporation. So I was an operations manager there. And then, I actually was a CEO at the North Central Catchment Management Authority in Central Victoria here in Australia.
[00:01:13] Damian Wells: And believe it or not, I actually went and was an environmental regulator for five years and I ran operations for the Environment Protection Authority in Victoria, which was a major eye-opener for me before coming back and taking on, nearly seven years ago, the job of managing director at Coliban Water.
[00:01:31] Piers Clark: I love it. That's been a life In water.
Alright, let's move to Coliban Water. Where are you? How many people do you serve? What sort of things do you do?
[00:01:39] Damian Wells: Coliban Water is in Central Victoria in Australia. For the people who know where Melbourne is, it's basically about an hour and 45 minutes drive up the road from Melbourne and we sort of go to the north, up to the Murray River.
[00:01:52] Damian Wells: It's a big geography that we serve but it's a relatively small population. It's 49 towns, 16 and a half thousand square kilometers but a lot of those towns is very small towns.
[00:02:04] Damian Wells: People may have heard of Bendigo, which is a major population center. Echuca is a famous town on the River Murray. And we've got castle Main Chiton. And then we've got many other smaller towns across that geography.
[00:02:16] Damian Wells: So in many ways our challenge is the tyranny of the geography in terms of serving. It's about 170,000 people, but it's across a huge area.
[00:02:25] Damian Wells: I tried to find what size that equivalent to with it. The thing that came up on Google said it's about the same size as Kuwait.
[00:02:31] Piers Clark: Wealth of Kuwait,
[00:02:34] Damian Wells: No, it does not have the wealth of Kuwait.
[00:02:37] Piers Clark: Alright. Now, the topic we're gonna talk about today are the bushfires, which seem to be a regular occurrence. It feels like they come up every year.
[00:02:45] Piers Clark: Tell me some of the history of the bushfires and how you go about dealing with them.
[00:02:50] Damian Wells: Yeah, well, Southeastern Australia from a biology ecology perspective, it's an absolute boom and bust environment. So, the boom is when you get the really wet years, flood years that's where you get the big boom in water resource, big boom in biology and ecology response. But then the bust is the extreme dry and drought, and that is not new. That has always been a feature of this landscape.
What we're experiencing now with climate change is that the booms are more extreme and the busts are more extreme. And so, if you go back to October 2022, we had the biggest floods in living memory in Central Victoria. We had a incident team stood up 64 days, 24 7, responding to floods in our region. Absolutely unbelievable.
[00:03:38] Damian Wells: Fast forward a few years, here we are in 2026 and we've had two failed winters and springs. I would say that we are heading into our third year of drought and that's starting to put our water resource under pressure.
[00:03:51] Damian Wells: Obviously we've done a lot of work to try to smooth out those boom and busts in terms of our water security management. However, we continue to move into these uncharted waters.

[00:04:02] Piers Clark: The challenge we have across the water sector around the world is we've built infrastructure that is to deal with the environmental volatility, weather changes.
[00:04:09] Piers Clark: If you've got these extreme droughts, you need enormous reservoirs to catch that water then so that in the three, four years later you'd be able to deal with it. But we don't, we generally don't have those assets.

[00:04:20] Damian Wells: Yes. We are really starting to front up to our over reliance on surface water and traditional systems. And so we need more manufactured water in the system at the end of the day and that's something that we are certainly turning our minds to.
[00:04:33] Piers Clark: Alright, let's talk about the bushfires because bushfires is something that is not a uniquely Australian challenge, but it is a very specific Australian challenge. We don't have bushfires here in the UK.
[00:04:44] Piers Clark: Walk me through a bushfire event, how it appears, what sorts of things you do, how you manage that circumstance.
[00:04:51] Damian Wells: You really have to go back a couple of years when it basically stopped raining. And so what's happened in the catchment, you had the wet years, you get a really strong response in terms of undergrowth in the forest, but also grass. So there's a lot of what we call fuel load right across the landscape.
[00:05:06] Damian Wells: Two very dry winters and springs. So the environment is in a highly volatile state. So what do you need? You need an ignition source and you need wind. And all of a sudden, a fire can run very quickly, very aggressively across the landscape.
[00:05:21] Damian Wells: So, this summer has been so hot in Australia, like crazy hot. We got this really long heat wave just recently, and it culminated in what was forecast under the fire preparedness forecasting as a catastrophic fire risk day. So this is early January. We had days 43, 45, 45, 47, 48 centigrade temperatures back to back.
I mentioned the tyranny of the geography. We've got every single one of those 49 towns setting records. I think there was three or four new records, new benchmarks set across the space of 10 days in response to this heat wave. So, we'd already stood up an incident team. We were running 24 7 in response to the heat forecast and the catastrophic forecast.
We were very focused on making sure that our water treatment plants were absolutely robust to make sure we could have service continuity for our customers because we're experiencing peak water demand right across our entire network.
[00:06:19] Damian Wells: The big issue with bushfires is they run on the wind change. The big movement and devastation of fire always occurs on a strong wind change. So, the weather on the 9th of January was forecast to have that really strong wind change in the afternoon and as it turns out, there was an ignition source, and that's actually under investigation by police. It's not clear how that fire actually started.

[00:06:43] Piers Clark: Surely people aren't stupid enough to go and deliberately start these fires, are they?

[00:06:48] Damian Wells: Unfortunately, there are some nutters out there that do start fires deliberately. Now, I don't know about this event. I understand that's still subject to investigation but dry lightning is a major source of ignition for these fires.
[00:07:01] Piers Clark: How do you get alerted that there is a fire and how do you monitor it?
[00:07:08] Damian Wells: There's a thing called the Vic Emergency App. It's standard practice for everyone to subscribe to the Vic Emergency App. You go into the app, you set your watch zones. And in your watch zone, it sends you alerts. So, it'll ping you to tell you there's something.
[00:07:23] Damian Wells: That's how many people find out. We have our incident team stood up at this time. So they're constantly monitoring the operating environment. So they are watching the Country Fire Authority website. They're watching the Vic Emergency website, so they know very early if there's a particular issue.
[00:07:40] Damian Wells: And so we could see that there was a fire over to the west. We knew that the wind was coming from the west, but it was sort of heading more towards the east and a bit to the south. And we were worried about that it was actually heading towards one of our water treatment plants.
[00:07:55] Damian Wells: Now, that water treatment plant does have water curtain defenses. It's like a curtain spray from above to protect the structure of the building in the event that fire comes but many of these things haven't always been tested in anger. So,
[00:08:08] Damian Wells: We were also thinking about engaging with the firefighters about could we have a helicopter drop some retardant or drop something to protect, but then all of a sudden bang! The fire moved straight through a hundred k an hour winds. Took the fire right across a whole town called Harcourt, relatively small town. It's a famous area for growing wine grapes and growing apples, producing cider.
[00:08:33] Damian Wells: But it was a devastating direct hit on that town. 54 homes absolutely razed to the ground. Major businesses impacted. A lot of rural impacts as well.

[00:08:46] Piers Clark: This must be catastrophic for your customers. How are some of them coping and what can you do to support them?
[00:08:52] Damian Wells: We've taken an internal decision that we will self fund and bearing in mind we're a hundred percent customer funded business. We will effectively work with those directly affected customers to give them bill relief on their customer water bills.
[00:09:06] Damian Wells: Tomorrow the rural bills will go out. We are giving a $300 credit on those bills just to soften the blow of getting a water bill at a time when you're under duress. In terms of the urban bills, we've got a big road there because if you think about losing your home, you've got fixed charges in your water bill and variable charges on your water bill.
Now, many of these people don't actually have insurance. So we will be providing bill relief for those customers who've lost their home. We are not gonna send 'em a water bill. We're going to absorb that in the short run.
[00:09:38] Damian Wells: We've got a pretty mature, what we call our Coliban assist program, and we'll roll that out to anyone that needs help.
[00:09:45] Piers Clark: Excellent. Now, help me understand the size of the incident team you've got there because you are a relatively small utility and you've got this major event. How do you tap into the resources to have the right people doing the right things?
[00:09:57] Damian Wells: We've got 300 people at Coliban Water and we've got a range of strategic partners in terms of our service provision. Off the back of those 2022 floods, we really built some significant maturity in our emergency management and incident management capability. So we've got some brilliant people who are so seasoned and so good at their roles. We are all AIMS trained, which is effectively the training to work in an incident framework.
[00:10:22] Damian Wells: We formally have an incident manager appointed, plus all the roles to support the role of the incident manager. And the incident manager can overrule the managing director. They are the general in the event of an incident.
[00:10:34] Damian Wells: I feel so proud of the people in our business. We all live here. This is our community. So it's personal for us. And so you see it in their actions. You see it in their thinking. They're always thinking through the community consequence lens. Not just what's the impact on the assets? What is the impact on the community, and what do we need to do to support the people, the humans who are impacted here?

[00:10:59] Piers Clark: Do they blame you at all or do they recognize that you are there as a sort of supporting source?
[00:11:05] Damian Wells: The Harcourt community were amazing. The firefighters did an amazing job, saved many homes, saved many community assets. They were so grateful for all of the emergency services work.
We had staff in the relief centers. We had staff manning the drinking water trailers, giving people drinking water. We have updates on our website, 10:00 AM and 3:00 PM every day. We are directly SMSing all customers to give them updates as to what we are doing, what timeframes can be expected in terms of restoration of services.
[00:11:38] Damian Wells: Our team did unbelievable work to restore the network. It took a lot of work, but basically the fire was on the Friday afternoon and we had the first water restoration on the Tuesday night, and then by Wednesday night, we had the network restored, but it was under a do not drink notice. And that's actually pretty significant in the sense that if you can shower at home, if you can go to the toilet at home, that is a huge change.
[00:12:03] Piers Clark: Especially for the elderly or the very young.
[00:12:05] Damian Wells: Absolutely. So that is a huge outcome in and of itself. But then we have to obviously flush all the network, get all the samples done, agree with the Department of Health, that safe drinking water has been restored, and then we're able to lift that do not drink notice on the Saturday. So, on the eighth day from the fire, we had safe drinking water back in the home.

[00:12:26] Piers Clark: And that does sound incredible. Now, let's talk about the future. This isn't sustainable. With the climate crisis getting worse, this is only going to become worse.
[00:12:34] Piers Clark: Is there an answer for how this gets managed in 10 years time?
[00:12:38] Damian Wells: Look we know that these events are just gonna keep coming. In the response to the floods, we are changing where we put our assets. Getting them out of the floodway, move sewer pump station, electrical boards up out of flood risk to recover quicker.
[00:12:53] Damian Wells: With fire, we're absolutely turning our minds to what does greater resilience look like? Where are the assets? What is the way to protect them? In some of the high country where there's huge forested areas, they've started adopting techniques such as using this silver wrap to wrap around assets before fires.
[00:13:13] Damian Wells: And unbelievably, this stuff seems to work. So,

[00:13:15] Piers Clark: Like a turkey being wrapped in foil?
[00:13:17] Damian Wells: Yes, exactly like that. And so you could wrap a sewer pump station, you could wrap other critical assets. That's quite an extreme measure of defense, but how do you have more resilient systems overall is a big question. How do you make sure your positioning of your water treatment plants, for us meter assemblies, make sure there's not plastic in those meter assemblies if you can avoid it.
[00:13:39] Damian Wells: How do you make sure that if things are gonna burn that you can recover quickly. How do you communicate with community? So when you know there's hot weather or there's floods coming, we are communicating with community saying make sure you've got some self resilience here. We think you should have enough food and water and warmth and whatever else to survive the first 72 hours on your own without any support.
[00:14:05] Piers Clark: Excellent. Damian, I could delve into this for hours but we are running outta time and we always like to finish with the question, if you could go back in time, go back 20, 25, 30 years.
[00:14:17] Piers Clark: What advice would you give your younger self?
[00:14:19] Damian Wells: If I could go back, I think the key for any successful organization is really ensuring that the whole business works that you're taking a systems view, that you're taking a whole of enterprise view. And what you're trying to do is you're building a business that can withstand whatever's coming at it.
[00:14:38] Damian Wells: So there's no playbook for how we're going to navigate climate change. You have to be able to respond to these extreme events. You have to be able to navigate financial markets, you have to be able to navigate changes to regulation.
[00:14:51] Damian Wells: If you can build capable, resilient organizations with can-do attitudes in the people, smart people who can work positively together. If I could go back 20, 30 years, I would learn more and more and more and more about how to do that.
[00:15:07] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Damian Wells, the managing director at Coliban Water in Australia, and we've been talking about bush fires and how they can be responded to.
[00:15:21] Piers Clark: Thank you to our sponsors, and until next time, keep asking questions, keep sharing, and keep safe.