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

On the 8^th February the Victorian Government requested the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre ( Bushfire CRC) to establish a Research Taskforce to collect data from the aftermath of the Victorian Bushfires and analyse the data.  The Bushfire CRC created a team of 50 researchers from across Australia, NZ and the US to painstakingly and systematically collect data.

An interim report was produced in June 2009 based on the preliminary findings, for consideration by the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission.

While it is stressed throughout the interim report that the findings are preliminary and likely to change as more of the data is analysed, there were some very interesting preliminary findings.  In particular some of the information in relation to the houses examined, which had burned down, was very interesting.

In the report, entitled Victorian 2009 Bushfire Research Response Interim Report June 2009, draws on the research from over 1000 homes, which they surveyed.  From this information a number of conclusions were drawn.  Some are not new , although perhaps some of us had forgotten some of them, such as:

• Active defense of properties is a major facet in house survival
• The type of house, its structure, quality and age appear to be factors in survival rates
• Wind damage should be a key factor in building standards
• Plastic or fiberglass tanks are more vulnerable than metal or concrete tanks in a fire.
• Pumps and pipe work need to be carefully designed and located.
• Mains water and electricity are not reliable in a bushfire
• Vegetation next to or overhanging a house, whether isolated or not, is a major contributing factor in house loss.

Others findings appear to be new and perhaps different from the previous prevailing view, such as:

• Mud brick houses and houses with lightweight frames and timber or cellulose cement sheet cladding are significantly more at risk than brick houses.
• About one fifth or 20% of house losses studied appear to have been directly related to their proximity to forest.
• Houses were destroyed that were over 380 meters from continuous bush, and this distance may well be wider after all the data is analysed
• Over half the houses destroyed on 7 February were not in an area with a Wildfire Management Overlay

For the full report: Victorian 2009 Bushfire Research Response Interim Report June 2009

Since the fires on Black Saturday we have heard a lot more about the Fire Danger Index or FDI so we thought we’d take a look at what the FDI is all about and what it means to community preparations and decisions about bushfire risk.

There are actually two ratings. There is the FFDI – Forest Fire Danger Index and the GFDI or Grass Fire Danger Index.  For the sake of simplicity (and it really is all quite complicated) here we will focus on the FFDI

The Forest Fire Danger Index was developed by A.G. McArthur  a CSIRO scientist.  McArthur developed a tool to give a figure for a combination of factors, which influence fire behaviour.  These factors are:

• Temperature
• Humidity
• Wind speed
• Rain fall
• Drought factor

It is  usually calculated using a standard fuel load.

The FFDI gives an overall rating but it can also can be broken down into a prediction of flame height, spotting distance and rate of spread. The FFDI varies from place to place and for different times of the day.   The FFDI will only be as accurate as the weather predictions put into the calculation.

The original FFDI had a maximum rating of 100.  McArthur used the 1939 Victorian bushfires which killed 71 people and burned more than a million acres to set this as the maximum, as he considered these fires to have occurred under the worst conditions possible.

In our trawling of the information available about the FFDI we were either blinded by the science of it all, or confused by the exceptions and differences of opinions about the index.  Suffice to say, as a society we are learning all the time and the FFDI is not infallible and seems to be continually tested and tweaked by a whole array of researchers.  There is also a recent indicating that wind is THE most significant factor contributing to bushfire behaviour, followed by relative humidity and then temperature.

Some points to note:

• At around FFDI 40 the CFA in Victoria anyway, declares a Code Purple day.  This is a day one step short of a Total Fire Ban day.  It is still a bad day but for a variety of reasons has not been declared a TFB.  It is not publically announced but fire fighters are notified via their pagers.

• At around FFDI 50, after consulting with the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), the CFA in Victoria declares a day of Total Fire Ban.

• Bushfire CRC Research paper in December 2005 found that nearly all fires where more than 40 houses were destroyed, the FFDI was over 70.  (Link: http://bushfirecrc.com/search/downloads/_%20FEF_D1i-StringencyAS3959_final.pdf

So to get some perspective on the effect of the FDI and what it means for community:

• January 1939  FFDI 100 –Victoria - 71 people died, 650 buildings destroyed
• 7 February 1967 FFDI 100– Tasmania – 62 people died, 1300 homes lost.
• 16 February, 1983  FFDI 120 – South Australia and Victoria – 75 people died, 3700 buildings damaged or destroyed.
• December 93 – Jan 94  FFDI 96 - NSW and QLD, 4 people died, 206 homes burnt.
• January 1997  FFDI 50 –Dandenong Ranges, Victoria, 3 people died,  41 houses, destroyed, 400 hectares burnt.
• January 2003  -FFDI 102 – Canberra– 3 people died, 543 houses lost.
• 7 February 2009 FFDI 189 – Victoria – 173 people died and 2000 buildings lost.

The Interim Report of the Royal Commission into the 2009 Victorian Bushfires reports that in community consultations,residents of fire affected areas said that the most up to date information about the fires came from scanners.

A scanner or radio scanner or listening device or CFA scanner, allows you to listen to the conversation between 000 and the fire trucks.  It is immediate and direct information from the fire ground.....BUT they are not perfect.  They can be difficult to understand, they are noisy and can be quite disruptive, they may be affected by heavy smoke, they need to be monitored constantly and if the fire develops the communications will move to a frequency not publicly accessible.

But they may provide vital, real time bushfire information.  They usually cost about $200 - $250. However, in July the CFA signed a $32 million contract to purchase digital radios which will then involve phasing out scanner radios over the next two years.