ABSTRACT
With no sense of irony, we frequently congratulate ourselves upon the heroic behaviour of the emergency services in a disaster. If the emergency services have to be heroic, then hazard management has failed since the objective is to reduce a potential disaster to the easily manageable. Equally, the emergency services frequently have to compensate with heroism for the failures of command, communication and control during the disaster, and mismanagement and negligence prior to the disaster.
