On 18 November 2011 at 4.50 am, Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) responded to an automatic fire alarm at Quakers Hill Nursing Home. The events of that day led to the full evacuation of nearly 90 high-level care elderly patients and the largest loss of life by fire in NSW in over 30 years. While there is no doubt that rapid response and highly professional firefighting saved many lives, this catastrophic fire led to the obvious and inevitable question on how such a large loss of life could have been prevented or mitigated, and how such a large loss of life among the most vulnerable in our community could be prevented in the future.

This paper gives an overview of the events of that day and discusses, from a fire service perspective, the post-fire joint investigation involving the NSW Police Arson Team, Police Forensic Team and FRNSW Fire Investigation and Research Unit (FIRU).

The joint investigation led to FIRU undertaking a post-fire research process that included the reconstruction of nursing home rooms designed to be duplicates of those initially involved in the fire, and the burning of those rooms under close scientific scrutiny. In turn, that post-fire research work, along with a thorough and comprehensive joint investigation, provided irrefutable evidence to firstly confirm what happened that day and, importantly, to bring about consensus on the need for legislative change that led to the retrospective fitting of fire sprinklers to all existing residential aged care facilities in NSW.

This paper will discuss what worked well during that investigation / research phase, why it worked so well and what this means for the future role of emergency services in utilising fire research to argue for policy change.