PHOTOS: Firies flood TRECC with community knowledge for major conference

The Australian Community Engagement and Fire Awareness Conference has come to Tamworth for the first time in the event's 22-year history.

Hosted by the NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS), the event brings together a huge number of community engagement practitioners from fire brigades, emergency response teams, and private companies.

"It's a conference that brings together, on this occasion, more than 400 delegates from across the nation and New Zealand to enable community engagement practitioners to share, learn, and grow together," RFS North Western Area Commander, Chief Superintendent Heath Stimson said.

"The experience levels from the 400 people here today are far and wide. There's not an emergency or disaster that these people have not been involved in managing, working directly with impacted communities."

The theme of the conference is 'we're in this together,' a message RFS deputy commissioner Peter McKechnie finds especially pertinent for Tamworth and the New England North West.

Deputy Commissioner McKechnie says it's important to draw from a wide pool of information and lived experiences, especially from regional communities who often bear the brunt of fires and floods.

"For us, our communities are part of what we do. They're not just somebody that's at the end of a disaster," he said.

"The more we engage with our communities, the more we understand what their fears are, what their concerns are, what their priorities are, and what we can do to ensure they're well-prepared."

As the next fire season for Northern NSW approaches, the Deputy Commissioner said homeowners should start preparing now.

He recommends clearing combustible materials around the house, checking the readiness of any firefighting equipment you have, and most importantly making a bushfire survival plan.

"Our morning's keynote speaker spoke about how we're now starting to see some communities that are almost in a permanent state of preparing or recovering. They're not getting a respite between disasters," Deputy Commissioner McKechnie said.

"That's a real challenge. How do you prepare for the next disaster when people are still dealing with the outcomes of a flood, and we want them to prepare for a fire?"

The answer, he says, is to make partnerships. Partnerships between all levels of government, but also among communities, indigenous groups, and even private sector agencies.

Those partnerships can help implement new technologies to improve disaster preparedness across the country, says keynote speaker and Natural Hazards Research Australia CEO, Andrew Gissing.

"We can use all the information we have in our physical world, but also the information out there about our digital footprints. That data can be used to tailor emergency warnings to individuals," Mr Gissing said.

"That could be combined with technologies like augmented reality to give people a visualisation of what a hazard might look like and make warnings interaction so that when it's issued it's more like a conversation than just reading a text message."

Ideas like these and many more were discussed on Friday and will continue tomorrow, Saturday June 22, at the Tamworth Regional Entertainment Conference Centre.