Personal Protection

Written by Kate Lawrence

There are lots items available to prepare for bushfires.  Many of them are common household items or clothing and many are specialist items.  The costs can run into $100's or $1000's  This can be daunting and overwhelming.  But the basics are usually readily available, you can build up the items over time as you develop your knowledge, and depending on the risk and capcity, people have sucessfully defended homes and saved lives with not much in the way of specialist gear.

The first thing to do is to collect a personal protection kit for each person in your household, and if likely for visitors as well.  Such a kit should include  clothing in natural fibres (eg cotton or light wool). It is a balance between clothing that does not overheat you and allows air to circulate and covering any exposed skin to protect it from radiant heat. The basic items you need are:

A broad brimmed or hard hat (protection from embers going down the back of your shirt is important)

Goggles to protect your eyes from smoke and ash

P2 facemask for your mouth and nose

Long sleeve shirt

Trousers

Sturdy leather boots

Woollen socks

Leather gloves that fit well

Battery/dynamo torch

Battery/dynamo radio

Woollen blanket and

Drinking water.

A kit can be put together often with things you already own or you can buy from a second hand store.  Here on Fire In Mind we sell some of the harder to find items. Go to our Products page to see what we have.

And if you want to prepare a kit for evacuation and post evacuation, the Red Cross have a great resource in their Redi Plan. It has a series of sheets and checklists etc for preparing an evacuation/emergency plan. Here is the link. Red Cross emergency REDIPlan