ABSTRACT
This chapter describes workers and managers interviewed after the Australian Black Saturday bushfires to give a deeper understanding of, and personal reflections on, the impacts of the pressures on workers. It provides workers and their agencies tools or practice structures that will assist them to prepare for the scale of disasters, for the personal impacts of the work involved, and the types of supports that will assist workers deployed to disaster sites. The immediate desire of social workers going into disaster sites is to work long hours with little break because of the scale of need. Social workers who have worked in this field speak of working in the field for extensive periods without a day off, and then ‘hitting a wall’ or burnout phase about two months into their post-disaster work. Social workers who work in disaster situations must be very conscious of self-care in the field because of the tendency to work long hours under trying conditions.
