The 2019/20 Kangaroo Island bushfires, with David Ryan, Chief Executive, SA Water, Australia

[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, educate, and inform other water sector leaders from around the globe. My name is Piers Clark and my guest today is David Ryan, Chief Executive at SA Water in Australia. David, brilliant to be connected with you once again,
[00:20] David Ryan: Great to have the chance to be talking to you today.
[00:23] Piers Clark: Now we all know how this work. The first 90 seconds is me hearing about you and your background. Tell me how did you land up in this role in Adelaide at SA Water?
[00:32] David Ryan: I've got a sort of varied background before I got into the water sector. Sport was my background. I didn't quite land where I wanted to. I did a whole range of things and ended up working on sports grounds as the groundsman for many years
[00:46] David Ryan: And I went back to uni as a mature age student, did environmental science, got into the water sector. Absolutely loved it. Ended up as managing director at City Westwater. And then this gig came up in Adelaide at SA Water and at SA Water you're basically responsible for the whole state, urban, regional, rural, remote. And that bit really appealed to me. So I've been here about five and a half years now and love it.
[01:09] Piers Clark: Brilliant. And just for people who aren't familiar with the Australian geography, the state that you're talking about is obviously South Australia. And because Australia's a unique country in terms of where the cities are spaced can you just describe what it's like working in Adelaide as opposed to being in, say, Melbourne?
[01:25] David Ryan: The fairly unique pieces around it, it's the driest state in the driest inhabited continent. It's vast distances to drive from the bottom to the top of our state will take you 24 hours driving. People spread out a lot. As I mentioned rural, regional, remote aboriginal communities. The urban challenges, and we rely heavily on the river Murray as well, our largest water system in the country, and also in many ways, one of the most contentious as well.
[01:53] Piers Clark: Yes, I tend to put the Murray-Darling Basin in the same category as you put the Colorado River in North America. It sort of starts in one place and finishes in another but it transects through some really important communities and what one community does with that water source impacts everyone else in the catchment. How many people are in the South Australia state?
[02:12] David Ryan: We basically service about 1.4 million and the large majority of those are living in Adelaide. We've got 27,000 kilometers of water mains. One runs for 800 kilometers. We've got 14 desal plants, varying sizes, groundwater systems. I mentioned the river Murray and reservoirs as well.
[02:34] Piers Clark: So I've got it. You've got a significant population, but actually it's quite low density if you spread it out across the vast area that you are covering. You are in the driest state, in the driest continent, and you've got multiple assets that are quite complicated, such as desal units and very long pipelines.
[02:52] Piers Clark: And the topic we're going to talk about today is climate resilience and in particular how you've dealt with some of the bush fires. So let's move to that now. What's been your personal experience of these and what's been the corporate experience?
[03:05] David Ryan: Unfortunately, living in such a dry climate, bush fires are part of our history, they're part of our present, and unfortunately, we know they're gonna be part of our future as well. Kangaroo Islands, the third largest island in Australia, it's about 440,000 hectares. I think from one end to another is about 150 kilometers. I joined SA Water in November 2019. That summer of 19-20 was a particularly bad summer and the Kangaroo Island bush fires kicked off late December, just before Christmas, but then really burned all the way through January.
[03:44] David Ryan: And I do need to mention, you know, a couple of people over on Kangaroo Island lost their lives. Over 80 odd houses lost tens of thousands of livestock, and also a large proportion of that island is native vegetation as well. And through that we had to provide, continue to provide essential water services which was enormously challenging because it wasn't like an episode that was up in a couple of days and gone - this burnt for well over a month.
[04:10] Piers Clark: And you just arrived. I guess you'd had experience of being managing director at City Westwater but you were new into this organization, which is an order of magnitude bigger and more complex. What was that like?
[04:25] David Ryan: Enormously challenging. It tests your resilience personally, but what I saw here at SA Water are the same things I've experienced across the water sector and I've been blessed to work also at Melbourne Water and Barwon Water as well. And the same characteristics I experienced here is that people care deeply about what they do. At times of crisis where you have an incident like this, people's willingness to come together to do what needs to be done is just phenomenal. And you see the best of people really come out through those experiences. Yes, it was a different organization, different context, different state, but the same characteristics came to the fore.
[05:06] Piers Clark: It is glorious, isn't it? In the water sector generally, everybody's proud to be a steward of the environment and it's what they do. I guess my question is, are there things now that you look at and think, “Oh, I would've handled that differently if I'd known then what I know now”, or was the organization familiar enough with how to deal with bushfires that there was a set process that was followed that couldn't really be finessed to be better?
[5:30] David Ryan: I'm enormously proud of the way the organization responded and we have good incident management approach. And equally there were a range of lessons for us. We then had probably the state's largest natural disaster which was the River Murray Floods in 22-23. We learned to be really clear about what are the 1, 2, 3 key principles that we keep absolutely front of mind no matter what. On a day-to-day basis things are changing. All the time there's new things getting thrown at you. And for us, we learn to, first of all, gotta keep our people safe. We've gotta provide essential services as long as we possibly can to the most number of people and we've gotta protect our assets.
[06:15] David Ryan: We just set those principles really right at the start of the floods and that really guided all of our decision making. And I think had we set those principles at the start of the Kangaroo Island bush fires, it may have just helped in some of the pretty crazy things that come up.
[6:30] Piers Clark: I love that you've gotta have these guiding principles that when times are tough, you go back to, it's a bit like your corporate values. You have to test them and check that you are making decisions aligned with those. Right. Let's come back to the Kangaroo fires. Walk me through some of those crazy things that happen. Some of the things that would be anecdotes that people listening to this podcast might be able to come with you on the journey of what would I have done in that circumstance there, but for the grace of God, go I, is the scenario.
[07:00] David Ryan: So we have a reservoir over there and we lost the treatment plant. So we put in a temporary treatment to be able to provide water for the community that relied upon a generator because the power was out. And at one stage the plant was surrounded by flames. We attempted to get someone in, on a helicopter to be able to fuel that up, that didn't work 'cause it was too smoky and they couldn't land.
[07:22] David Ryan: We then put them in a military vehicle to be able to try and find a safe passage through. That didn't work. And then right at the last minute, and this was in the last hour we were estimating we were to run out of diesel in the generator. There was a fiery country fire service person who just happened to be able to get through to the plant and used the jerry cans there and filled that generator up and kept water on.
[07:48] Piers Clark: No, I can imagine that you find yourself thinking that's one of those ones where the resiliency of what you could have planned to do ahead of time. So tell me, how did the event come to a close, it started in, I think you said November 2019. And it ran on until when?
[08:05] David Ryan: It was basically December, really when it kicked off and ran on till late January 2020. It would often sort of start to die down for a day or so and then conditions would kick off and we're talking incredibly strong winds through that period. It was really then about asset protection, very much for country fire service over there.
[08:25] David Ryan: And then eventually they managed to get the fire out. Conditions go in your favor. And we learned some lessons and one of those was we needed to build more resilience in our water supply system over there. So we've now built a further desalination plant and connected up some of the separate water supply systems, which provide benefit for the community now in terms of new connections and equally provide greater resilience from a fire protection perspective.
[08:55] Piers Clark: Of course you didn't know it at the time, but one month after the fires had gone out, we were then in the pandemic and that must have added an extra challenge to the cleanup operation and getting things back on track.
[09:05] David Ryan: There were an enormous amount of valuable lessons going through the pandemic. Not just in responding to something like bushfire and the recovery and cleanup, but equally how do you lead an organization through that period.
[09:20] Piers Clark: Thank you for taking us through that journey. I think, we can all imagine what it must have been like to be a fresh leader inside an organization facing this sort of testing challenge. We like to finish with a bit of a personal question. The question I've got for you is, what do you owe your parents? What have your parents given you that's helped make you into the man you are today?
[09:40] David Ryan: This is a very profound question for me. I'm one of 10 children. I grew up on a small dairy farm. We didn't have a lot on that dairy farm, and my parents were absolutely an enormous influence on my life. Gave me a whole range of things many of which I try and carry through today. Things like, and I know it mightn't sound like the greatest trait or quality, but I think the ability to work hard is really important. And my parents certainly instilled to be a good person. And I think that's really important to carry through in the workplace as well, and to constantly piece around curiosity. How can I get better? How can I improve myself, and particularly in the service of others? and I've tried to carry those traits through today.
[10:10] Piers Clark: I am sure they are incredibly proud of what you've done. You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been David Ryan, Chief Executive at SA Water in Adelaide, Australia. I hope you can join us next time. Thank you.