The fire and emergency services is a particularly large industry - in Australia alone it employs 250, 000 personnel - yet there is very little by way of published human factors books addressing this sector directly. This book provides an overview of state-of-the-art research that has been conducted within Australia, funded by the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre. As Karl Weick once commented, emergency events do not 'play by the rules' and these research chapters tell us something about a potential future world of work that is highly dynamic, interdependent and for which improvisation and critical thinking and problem-solving are necessary pre-requisites.