13 ways to avoid another Black Saturday
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Yesterday, Frank Campbell outlined how the state of Victoria failed to protect its citizens on Black Saturday. Today he outlines the bushfire reforms that he believes need to be implemented to avoid another disaster: By 2010 Australian bushfire policy will be literally turned on its head. How is it possible that fire authorities in the two most dangerous wildfire places in the world, Victoria and Southern California, give diametrically opposed advice? Consider Topanga Canyon near Los Angeles. Steep and rugged, with just one road out. Three died in a 1993 wildfire, so the locals came up with a five-stage plan. Ideally, leave the canyon or go to a Regional Shelter. Failing that, go to the nearest Community Safety Area. Few people are more than a kilometre or so away from one of these. If there’s no time, go to your Neighbourhood Survival Area. If you can’t do that and are caught in the open, lie face down in a ditch or similar where the air is cooler. Finally, the most dangerous option is to stay home. Don’t stay home unless instructed to by fire officials. So the most dangerous place is your house. Better to lie face down in a ditch. Californians who were flirting with “stay and defend” have dumped the idea since Black Saturday. We’re told that evacuations are impossible in the worst areas because the roads can’t cope. This is disingenuous. Local safe zones existed until recently. There’s no need for thousands to clog the exit. Many fled to Otway beaches on Ash Wednesday, just as they escaped to Gallipoli Park in Marysville. Staged, controlled evacuation is essential. Bushfire Reforms: 1) Designate a hierarchy of safe evacuation places on the Topanga model. A range of refuges is necessary to cope with sudden unpredictable threats and/or where retreat has been cut off. 2) Categorise wildfires like cyclones, on a scale of 1 to 5. Warnings calibrated accordingly. Define Category 5 as “firestorm” conditions. Scale evacuations appropriately for Categories 3-5. Category 3 for example might necessitate a purely local evacuation. Revise the “Total Fire Ban Day” system. People are blasé about these warnings. Revise the “Forest Fire Danger Index”. Any index which rates a location at 300 out of a maximum of 100 is misleading, as is a rating of “extreme” for an FFDI of only 50. 3) Abandon “stay and defend”. For those who do stay, mandate professional equipment, fire bunkers and defendable space. Dependants may have to evacuate. Why should your children die because you are over-confident? 4) Rationalise the various fire bureaucracies. Refer to Black Saturday’s chaos. Too many cooks, yet professional urban firefighters are excluded. A long list of necessary reforms… 5) Form Neighbourhood Firewatch to combat arson. I suggested this to the police and the CFA in 2008. No response. The Santa Monica Mountains Arson Watch is a good model. 6) Fire audit for every town and house in risky areas. Many Australian towns are shambolic accumulations of fuel waiting for a bushfire. Long grass, dead cars and stacks of firewood abound. There are also pine and bluegum plantations on the edge of and even inside towns. They have to go. The 2003 firestorm penetrated right through house-proud Canberra. Low-fuel Bendigo and Horsham burned on Black Saturday. They are Tidy Towns compared with the archipelago of neglect across the Goldfields. 7) Define defendable space for towns and houses. This will vary according to specific situations, but in firestorm-prone areas, safe space needs to be far greater than the current vague and small prescription. Flammable vegetation close to buildings should be replaced with low-oil deciduous vegetation. But remember that removing gum trees for twenty metres around your house won’t stop a firestorm. 9) “Controlled burning” merely creates a false sense of security while encouraging flammable vegetation. The crescendo of shrill demands for “controlled burning” is the most self-defeating and dangerous feature of the aftermath of Black Saturday. 3 million of the 8 million hectares of public land in Victoria have burned since 2002, some in the Black Saturday zone. It made no difference to the firestorm. It would make no significant difference to any firestorm. Worse, repeated burning dries out wet forests, altering the ecology permanently. Fire risk will escalate. “Controlled burning” gives a false sense of control, Black Saturday’s fatal flaw. It also gives CFA/DSE a new but irrelevant justification for their existence. They are both too valuable to be wasted on bush-burning. Public land is sadly neglected now by the ill-funded DSE. If resources are wasted on bush-burning, the neglect will worsen. The fundamental assumption behind “controlled burning” is false. Deliberate burning, as now practiced, burns fuel where it matters least — in the forest. A new strategy, combining fuel-free zones adjacent to assets, fuel reduction and fire barriers close to assets, as well as barrier vegetation, should be developed promptly. The question should be “how do we stop wildfire reaching property”? Reducing “fuel load” in the bush is a seductive but bogus notion. Defendable space is the key, not burning Mt Baw-Baw. The CFA currently gives no clear or adequate definition of defendable space for any level, whether of house, town or district. The planned 140km of 40 metre wide fire-breaks in the Otways is a case in point. Even a modest fire will carry easily across a grass and shrub firebreak. Even if the fire-break was concreted, severe fire would cross by ember blizzard and spotting. As usual, CFA/DSE policy plans for modest fires, not critical ones. Examining the 3km burn zone around Anglesea recently, the stupidity of this policy is self-evident: recently burned areas are neck-deep in rampant fine fuel. DSE intend to burn once in ten years, in rotation. The result will be long-term ecological damage to the national park, increased fire risk and false confidence among residents. Anglesea is just one of many undefendable towns. Ironically, the CFA, DSE, local government and residents do not burn where they should burn. Grass and flammable weeds like gorse infest towns and town outskirts everywhere. Fatal grass fires are not uncommon in Victoria. Redneck demands to strip roadside verges of vegetation perfectly express the bankruptcy of the extractive mind-set. Neither Greens nor wildlife cause firestorms. As most farmland is sterile wasteland, wildlife has no choice but to rely on remnant habitat on roadsides. Stripping trees from roadsides generates fire fuel such as grass. 17 were killed by grassfire on the wide highway at Lara in 1969. Feral right-wing commentators inflame redneck hysteria by defining roadside stripping as a choice between possums and people. We now know that few people died in crashed or blocked cars on Black Saturday. Some did, but that resulted from bad fire policy and administrative breakdown. Timely evacuation will keep people off the roads when severe fire strikes. 10) Barriers to wildfire are one solution: Deciduous Defence Removing fuel close to “assets” is crucial. So is the creation of wind, radiant heat and ember barriers. There are many engineering solutions, but given that flammable vegetation such as eucalypts close to buildings should be removed, deciduous trees such as English oaks, elms and poplars can be planted in depth, allowing suckers (and understorey oaks) to limit ground fire and ember attack. Native vegetation zealots should remember that eucalypts are messiduous. They drop flammable detritus 24/7/365. This detritus does not easily decompose as deciduous litter does. Eucalypts do not provide shade. They drop branches without warning. Eucalypts are designed by fire, for fire. Compromise is necessary. With 4% volatile oils, gum trees must go. If you want to live amongst them, accept the risk and plan accordingly. 11) Commence a complete critical review of fire science. Funding, organisation, and ideology should be assessed. There needs to be a critical analysis of all studies done to date. Vested interests which currently infest research institutions, departments and funding sources should be identified, with a view to forming independent, self-critical research bodies. 12) We need an independent bushfire commission. The single greatest flaw in Australia’s response to wildfire has been the isolation of fire science and fire management from public view. The entire structure is dysfunctional precisely because it has been ignored. Fire policy and science has evolved without scrutiny. Fire history has been forgotten. Dubious concepts and irrational practices have flourished uncontested. Vested interests have had a malign and distorting influence. The Independent Bushfire Commission (IBC) should permanently review the activities of all fire agencies. It should review every “controlled burn”, for example. Many “controlled burns” escape, some causing great damage and risk, such as the 2005 Wilson’s Promontory fire. Fire agencies cannot be trusted to self-regulate. We only have ourselves to blame for dysfunctional fire authorities and dubious fire science. There is scarcely a single journalist in the country familiar with wildfire. The “rural affairs” tag in big-city journalism is the kiss of death. At best a one-way ticket to Landline. The IBC should encourage public debate in the media. The urban bias in media reporting and analysis must be remedied. As for the commentariat, not one urban ideologist has even a passing acquaintance with wildfire. This did not inhibit them from pontificating after the event. Most gullibly accepted simplistic nostrums, unaware of the ulterior economic and political motives which generate them. As for the intellectual class, they’re more interested in Qantas leg-room than wildfire. Their fire plan is not to leave the café. Journalistic coverage of Black Saturday rarely transcended “colour” treatment. There was a kaleidoscope of incidental colour but precious little analysis. Journalists failed to interrogate bushfire or government officials. Few if any had the time or interest to familiarise themselves with bushfire science (which, you will have noticed, is not rocket science). Most were unaware of the sectional and sectarian motives driving the noisiest bushfire activists, repeatedly treating their views as gospel. Australia’s current affairs and intellectual magazines showed the briefest spasm of interest, followed by silence. The Spectator and The Monthly managed little more than colour sprinkled with some disconnected generalities. The Age, hometown newspaper and indispensable journal of record, has 28 op-ed spots per week. It hasn’t printed a single opinion piece on the fires for months. On the other hand, Crikey a dozen analyses of the fires. The media’s great success was to inflate the myth of the heroic fire-fighter. The common belief that CFA warriors will charge over the hill like the Light Brigade and stop the fire is truly dangerous. The Prime Minister’s excruciating oratory said it all. “Courage is a fire fighter standing before the gates of hell — unflinching, unyielding, with eyes of steel saying this: ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’” (23rd Feb 2009) Meanwhile, back at the branch, Greens fended off vicious attacks from rednecks and the Murdoch commentariat, even though Green policies were irrelevant to the firestorm. Green irrelevance was compounded by their opportunistic depiction of Black Saturday as Nature’s retribution for our carbon sins. Firestorm was the black raven of anthropogenic global warming. Climate change has not been mentioned once in this paper, for good reason. Regardless of global warming, new wildfire policies will be the same. While Greens hyperventilate about CO2, environmental degradation of the state continues unabated. Crikey’s environmental group blog Rooted managed only two brief, marginal comments on the fires (9th and 12th Feb.) Nature dies the death of a thousand cuts while the Green legion, with eyes of steel, marches off to Armageddon. 13) Integrated Land Management. Control of wildfire depends on integrated land management, which doesn’t exist. Wildfire planning is stymied by contradictory environmental policies. Here are a few:
And that’s just for starters. |
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Razing the bush for hundreds of metres around your house is absurd. Eliminating the bush in order to live in it is redneck mentality. If you want to live in the forest, clear a modest space and accept that the property is undefendable in severe wildfire. Either that or buy a paddock.
15 Comments
Wow.
A comprehensive article like this demonstrates the lack of meaningful coverage elsewhere.
This is why I subscribe to Crikey. An article on an important written not from a partisan perspective but an analytical one.
Well done Frank. I hope these points are considered amidst all the noise.
err correction — “important issue”
Wow! What an insightful report. It certainly puts to rest some of the red-neck responses to the fires!
I refer to this point:
4) Rationalise the various fire bureaucracies. Refer to Black Saturday’s chaos. Too many cooks, yet professional urban firefighters are excluded. A long list of necessary reforms…
For a supposed fire expert, this suggestion surprises me on several levels. Firstly, the use of the term ‘professional’ is utterly wrong, and any person who has worked in this area knows it. All trained firefighters are professional - paid career firefighters, retained firefighters and volunteer firefighters - all ‘professional’ once they have attained their requisite skills. Secondly, hundreds of urban firefighters from both Victoria, interstate and overseas were used during the February fires in a range of capacities - from manning ICCs to backfilling CFA firestations and a dozen roles inbetween. I observed a convey of urban MFB vehicles heading up the Hume Highway after Black Saturday to back up CFA urban crews. Thirdly, many MFB urban firefighters don’t have the required skills, protective clothing, gloves, helmets and other specialised equipment for wildfire activities since 99% of their activity is urban structural, road accident and hazmat related. Fourthly, urban fire trucks are generally ‘pumpers’, not designed to carry large amounts of water nor travel on hilly dirt tracks. Dedicated 4 x 4 tankers carrying thousands of litres of water are used for this purpose, and CFA has over 2,000 of them (compared with the MFB’s perhaps, half a dozen). Finally, the Victorian Government has had at least two inquiries into combining the main fire services in the past three decades, and the conclusions on both occasions were in the negative. As done overseas, every state in Australia separates its fire services in some way, shape or form and for good reason.
I know the stay and defend option is un iversally disliked but I cant see who would enforce evacuation. The police? the CFA? I would think they have much more important things to do than removing people who dont want to leave.
Does the person hold any responsibilty or just the government? One example,and I know it is only one, was the gent on four corners who initially wasn’t listening for any warnings and was reading in the dark, when the fire came he evacuated at the last minute but then complained that the government were responsible as the greenery was too close to the road and almost trapped him. I would say his problems were of his own making.
How long should the cfa or police have spent with this man who had done nil preparation
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Interesting list of proposals there and I must read your article still from yesterday.
Colleagues and acquaintenances on Rooted blog possibly relied on others like maybe my work learned in the wake of the 1994 NSW Bushfires way back then as policy officer for The Wilderness Society in NSW.
Certainly I’ve learned alot since I was called to the Parliamentary and Coronial Inquiry, released with no case to answer so to speak, and with Carr winning a state election on a forest/wilderness protection platform 13 months later. That didn’t just happen by accident. There was a very robust dynamic here in NSW after 4 deaths and great property damage. But still minimal compared to the Victorian tragedy.
A copy of the 1994 front page press report you won’t find on google from that time is here in my piece of 13 Feb 09:
http://www.sydneyalternativemedia.com/blog/index.blog/1879898/of-bushfire-horror-weather-and-woodchips/
And plenty more of my SAM articles through February 09 about the tragedy, and policy issues arising.
I added links and commentary to the crikey strings and on my own blog, referencing pretty much what you say above about land use drying out wet forests - with large format diagrams of just how this occurs. There is scientific referencing there too.
But more importantly I broadcast it to all federal and NSW MPs in the wake of disastrous Victorian tragedy knowing there would be all kinds of awful angles being played.
One thing about the tone of your article. Much content to recommend it but the penchant for condescension over a complex social economic ecological and political issue seems counter productive. Barely concealed contempt is not likely to attract cheers or even an audience.
Democracy is always messy. To expect any different is well … naive, which is ironic given all your obvious experience.
The accountability and justice that this distaster/tragedy demands should banish any thoughts of personal ego. Nothing less than an honest and tireless search for answers will do. May they rest in peace and forgive us our failings too.
Not all fires will be as fierce as the February 7 fires. “Stay and defend” is a reasonable strategy in almost all circumstances, providing the stayers/defenders are not idiots who think thongs and stubbies are firefighting clothing and sloshing water from plastic boxes is firefighting.
There are some people who simply should not live in the bush. You can pick their houses a mile off and you can usually smell them (fly-spray, de-odorizers, volatile disinfectants, inflammable plastic carpets, inflammable plastic curtains etc.). They are trying to recreate suburbia in the bush and it comes as a shock when the bush presents an unexpected side of its nature. The bush is not just bell-bird sound effects.
Frank,
Very interesting pieces.
I wonder if I could call you and ask you a question or two?
I left my email address and details with Andrew at Crikey at 11:00 this morning.
Thanks
Spacedog: It’s on the record that the assistance of urban firefighters was refused and/or ignored on the day. Some did get into the action, but the point is that there was no plan to use them. There’s a long history of tension between the various agencies, not least the urban firefighters union and the CFA. Better cooperation would invovle rationalisation of equipment, for one thing. As for who’s “professional”, it is a misleading word. By professional I meant paid. There’s a difference between a full-time career firefighter and the various classes of part-timers and volunteers. Training has improved a lot, but one can’t equate full-timers with volunteers. I take your point about urban firefighters- they need wilfdire experience, which many don’t get at the moment. The era of turf wars has to end now. The public knows how silly turf wars are, but are unaware of it. Which takes us back to constant scrutiny of fire agencies, which doesn’t exist at the moment.
Heathdon: I doubt that forced evacuation would work. If adults wants to stay and die, let them. Dependants are another matter. They may be children, disabled or elderly, so policy needs to be crystal clear. In any case, no agency is going to be able to extract unwilling people in an emergency. Current CFA advice on wildfire is misleading to say the least (see my previous Crikey articles and article in The Age on 10th Feb.) because it suggests that fire can be fought by householders with mops. Look at the CFA publication “Living in the Bush”. People were told they could cope. From now on, the advice will be that in severe fires and firestorms, residents should leave. This all depends on good advanced warnings of course, warning which mostly failed on Black Saturday. Since fire may strike without warning even in the best-run system, we need designated local refuges within a kilometre or so of everyone: footy ovals or whatever. Failing that, those in fire-prone places need a fire bunker- current ones cost around $3000-5000. Given that the govt. is likely to legislate new building regs. which will add $20,000 to the cost of a house to improve its chances in fire, $3k seems modest. the best-designed houses may still burn in a severe fire, but a bunker will give you an excellent chance, close to 100%.
Keith: Firestorms might strike once in 25 years. Localised severe fire far more often. Lesser fires certainly can be dealt with by well-prepared residents, and such fires are common. There’s the rub. What is “well-prepared”? Seeing so much footage of people in thongs and shorts “fighting‘“fires every summer tells us there’s insanity abroad. Given that the house is the fuel, not the refuge, the fact that people pile up flammable junk outside is crazy. Bushurbia magnifies this problem vastly. They are mostly city commuters who live in the bush. So education and preparation have to be redefined and taken seriously. There’s no reason at all why several thousand people won’t die in the next firestorm. Country towns also are often idiotic accumulations of rubbish, grass, gorse, plantations etc. yet this matter is not on anyone’s radar. As a London friend of mine said on seeing Goldfield towns for the first time, “this is an abuse of space”. We have so much space we can fill it up with vast accretions of stuff. An orgy of pointless accumulation. I’ve got a lot of bizarre photos illustrating this.
Tom: Probably I am being condescending, but having seen fire agencies evolving their dangerous wildfire policies for decades with close to zero criticism I thought bugger it, time to sink the boot in. There are fire scientists who have opposed wildfire policy and the grubby vested interests which surround it, and others like you and I who have tried to make ourselves heard. We failed absolutely.
Universally disliked? I don’t think so. It is endorsed by the overarching body AFAC (Australiasian Fire Authorities Council) to which all fire services in Australia/NZ belong. The policy of ‘leave early’ or ‘stay and defend’ has been in operation in various States for a long time, with some States being more active than others in educating people in bushfire-prone areas. People are told to ‘activate their fire plan’ but the trouble is, incredibly, some people have no plan at all, whilst others are just totally unprepared but decide to stay and defend anyway (or try to leave when the fire is at their property). You can’t outlaw stupidity. The policy to defend properties is not popular in California because home owners are not educated on how to defend. I suspect also that the topography and building materials used in housing make it doubly difficult.
Yes, from a practical perspective, forced evacuations are impossible on a large scale for many reasons. And like in the US, you will always get some people who will sit on their front porch with a shotgun waiting for police/firefighters because they are hellbent on defending their property regardless. Others will just hide inside till the police depart. It’s human nature.
I would suggest that it is a shared responsibility between individuals, government and fire services.
Frank - Both CFA and MFB ‘urban’ (as you call them) resources were used on 7 Feb and beyond. Look at this quote from MFB themselves:
“The total number of MFB incidents in the Metropolitan Fire District (MFD) on Black Saturday totalled 433 - an extremely high number. There was an increase in non-structure fires and incidents, attributed to a higher number of grass and scrub fires, due to strong winds knocking down trees and power lines. MFB crews managed to prevent any fires in the MFD from becoming major. We also have five MFB trucks that will remain stationed at CFA stations (acting as back ups) in Dandenong, Frankston, Hallam, Springvale and Patterson River. As the workload decreased in the MFD with the passing of the cool change on Saturday night, additional resources WERE MADE AVAILABLE to the CFA.”
And the following:
“MFB chief fire officer Tony Murphy and CFA deputy fire chief Steve Warrington said they had to protect all areas of the state during the fires of February 7, and that meant some career firefighters were not deployed to the blazes.”
Apart from MFB needing to maintain its own resources for massively increased fire and emergency service activity in the metropolitan area of Melbourne, I repeat that most MFB firefighters are NOT trained in wildfire and forest fire scenarios. Remember the Rockbank fire a few years ago where MFB supported CFA? The water-carrying helicopter could not drop its load because MFB firefighters had no idea what its siren meant! All this is slowly changing for the better however, and will continue to happen without the need for a combined service.
Re unions, actually it’s the UNITED (not Urban) Firefighters Union. At any point in time, the UFU is at loggerheads with any government fire service in Australia, so it is mischievous to suggest that CFA is singled out. The UFU made some stupid statements after the fires but did later apologise (privately however).
Re ‘turf wars’, there are none, no matter how sensational it might sound in the media to suggest there are. The geographic jurisdictions are well defined and both MFB and CFA mutually support each other in incidents and other emergencies that occur on both sides of the ‘border’. The same at airports and at State borders. Turf wars to me sounds like a relic of the 1960s. All services are beyond that now, though perhaps not in the minds of some who cannot accept the realities of today.
Re training - it is not correct to state that career firefighters are any better trained than retained or volunteer firefighters. The basic training modules are in fact identical, and a busy volunteer brigade can have well in excess of 500 call-outs a year so they get plenty of experience too. Integrated fire stations have both career staff and volunteers working together. As with every profession and trade, there are certainly varying degrees of skill, knowledge and experience amongst all firefighters.
Scrutiny is healthy, as long as it’s intelligent and well-informed. If it’s politically-motivated or driven by personal or other (hidden) agendas, then everybody loses.
Spacedog: Victoria is the strongest influence in AFAC. That fact, plus the “fire science” which backed the “stay or go” policy, is why “stay or go” became orthodoxy -gradually- after 1984. They even swayed some Californian fire services (no longer). (I don’t think I ever said the policy was “universally disliked’, as you say- my point was that it had become accepted to varying degrees in various places)
As for California be significantly different to Vic and therefore unsuitable for “stay and defend” , I’m familiar with the S.Californian canyon country and spent months photographing buildings there in the past. Re houses, the differences in materials and design are marginal. Would make little diff. in a fire. The canyon country is generally upscale housing, well-cared for, neat and tidy: very different from the shambolic accumulations of fuel around houses that we regard as normal here. Topographically, some canyons are death traps- steep, rugged etc. But the fuel load is generally a lot lighter than say the forests NE of Melbourne. But that Californian native fuel is high in volatile oils (and there are many eucalypts too). The ridges of Kinglake etc would probably, on balance, be on a par for fire risk with the more dangerous S.Calif. hill country.
The real problem is the policy is deadly. Yes of course many people have no “fire plan” and often get into big trouble doing crazy things. But the key point is that householders should not be encouraged to fight wildfire. CFA advice on how to tackle wildfire only applies to modest fires, not the mass killer fires. There’s no way the RC will allow that policy to continue.
Have a look at “Living in the Bush”: would you advise your friends or relatives to follow that advice on a bad fire day?
Nor am I arguing for mandatory evacuation: people should be told the REAL risks, told what equipment they need (fuel pumps, professional hoses, adequate water etc etc, not mops!) and have their property assessed for specific risk. They can then decide for themselves. A hierarchy of refuges (close, medium, distant) should be there to retreat to, depending on the timing and severity of the threat.
The Royal Commission, one hopes, will determine whether the various fire agencies should be rationalised in some way and also comment on whether “turf wars” exist or not. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t. I hear a lot from inside these organizations which suggests there’s considerable friction. On Black Saturday, it probably made no difference at all.
As to whether UFU assistance was at times refused on 7th Feb, it should come out in the R.C. Some very categorical statements were made after the fires and I’d be surprised if they were bogus.
And yes I know it’s the United F.U….
Fair enough Frank. I agree the ‘stay or go’ policy will need to be modified, but I think you’d agree that a simple ‘go only’ (ie, mass evacuatation) policy will not work either, as has been explained in the RC. In any event, these generational firestorms are impossible to fight with any resources. A few quick points:
- my reference to ‘universally disliked’ was to a previous poster
- I don’t think communities are being encouraged to fight wildfire per se, but rather simply given the option to defend their own home - a structure - which many people want to do, and can be done if fully prepared etc etc
- The policy may be deadly with these generation firestorms but seems to have worked well for the past two decades
- No I haven’t read that document (Living in the Bush) but will do so. I used to live in the Dandenongs surrounded by tall mountain ash trees. There is no way my house would have survived any wildfire there.
- I think everybody would agree that fire refuges need to be re-activated or built
- Human nature for people to bitch and complain about personnel from outside their own agency. I saw plenty of internal friction within and between DSE, DPI and Parks Victoria. Not a ‘turf war’ however.
- I think you mean MFB assistance, not “UFU assistance”. UFU has/had nothing to do with the availability or supply of resources.
We’ll await the initial RC findings so that we can all become 20/20 experts in hindsight!
Spacedog: Yes, I meant MFB. (UFU and MFB were firing off opposed messages in the aftermath, predictably. )
I’d be interested in what you think of “Living in the Bush”. It shows a family raking leaves etc, surrounded by forest, with a modest lawn and shrubs up against the house. There’s a 2004 CD, a booklet and a version is on the website (or was last time I looked).
re stay and defend- “can be done if fully prepared”: have a look at the evidence of Karen Ward at the RC, 24th June- the transcript can be downloaded. She was on straight after Packham. She and her CFA husband live near Beechworth on a bare 17 acres. Fully prepared, professional gear etc. No trees at all. Grass grazed down to the dirt. No flammable junk outside the house. They were well warned and confident. Fire appears on the top of the hill to the west, 500m away. She stands on the verandah and feels the heat burning her skin at that range. Hubby agrees- this is impossible- they drive away to safety. House burned down in 10 mins. “A carpet of fire” rolled down the slope and over the house.
Yep. Plenty of examples of people in that scenario, and of others who did stay and successfully defend, even amid the worst of it - I know a family of three adults that fought off the fire at Kinglake but they were very prepared with protective clothing, masks, helmets, diesel pumps and water. Others simply dived into water tanks, pools or underground bunkers and survived. Horses for courses. The new building code requirements should address some of these issues and RC recommendations will supplement this. Deluge systems for houses perhaps? It’s what I would have. They certainly work well enough for fire trucks trapped on forest tracks.