Are Victorians being seriously duped by the CFA's "Leave and Live" bushfire survival campaign?

With Victoria now experiencing the summer bushfire season we are again being urged to leave our homes and businesses to the mercy of bushfire through this year's questionable “leave and live” message.

I commenced this blog to primarily to assist my clients and anyone else interested to improve their understanding of bushfire behaviour and related building and planning scheme requirements, particularly the Bushfire Management Overlay (BMO).

However, the broad scale urging of people to leave their homes and businesses unprotected when bushfire may threaten is dangerous policy in that it serves to unnecessarily frighten many people, who with some detailed site-specific coaching and personal capability assessment could stay with their homes to protect them from ember attack — it's now well-known that ember attack is the major cause of building loss in a bushfire.

While there will be some people who should consider where they would be safer in the event of bushfire threatening their home, particularly those “old stock” homes that have no built-in bushfire protection measures and are close to forest or large tracks of scrub, such a broad-brush message can only create uncertainty and possibly expose homes that only need active defence against ember attack.

Such active defence can be undertaken before and after the passage of a fire front by well prepared occupants of the home. With fire brigade units unable to protect every dwelling and concentrate on stopping the spread of a fire, survival of the dwelling may depend entirely on the occupants defending it themselves.

One of my objectives with this blog is to provide some understanding of bushfire and how it spreads to involve buildings. As part of this coaching my Sunday, 15 June 2014 “Bushfire explained – Part 2: How bushfire move across the landscape” (click here) I provided information and before and after photographs of a house at Humevale lost in the 2009 bushfires.

I’ve since found a few more photographs that confirm the loss of that undefended home to ember attack, particularly at the vulnerable underfloor timber entrance door.

As in the earlier photographs, the clean and tidy lines of this brick veneer dwelling show the only direct bushfire threat to be in the form of nearby trees and shrubs. Significantly, the garage and contents at right remained unaffected by the passing fire.
The following photographs show scorched, but unburnt leaves on the adjacent trees and shrubs. I attribute the bare branches in the third photograph with the water pump and hot water service in the background to be the heat of the fire in the dwelling drying the moisture from the leaves sufficient to ignite them, but note not all the leaves.

The remains of an old timber dwelling — also shown in the background of one of the above photographs — completely unprepared to withstand ember attack is worth including as it shows that the fire driven by strong wind burning uphill did not extend to involve the eucalypt and pine tree foliage (crowning).

Bushfire Survival

Referring to the earlier statement: “With fire brigade units unable to protect every dwelling and concentrate on stopping the spread of a fire, survival of the dwelling may depend entirely on the occupants defending it themselves”.
The coastal town of Lorne is a good example of the potential for enormous, but avoidable property loss that includes numerous dwellings and a range of commercial properties, potentially millions of dollars.
According to this Community Information Guide (click here) Lorne has been assessed as being at “EXTREME” risk due to bushfire. It also includes the following statement “The Fire Danger Rating is CODE RED. Homes aren’t designed to withstand a bushfire during these conditions. Any fire that starts and takes hold will be so intense that you won’t be safe to stay and defend your home – no matter how well prepared it is”. This statement begs the question, including buildings well inside the perimeter of the township where the only real threat will be ember attack or a fire in a neighbouring garden that could be suppressed by well prepared residents?
If large numbers of people choose to not be in Lorne on a forecast Code Red or extreme bushfire threat day, will the fire agencies pre-position sufficient resources to protect the otherwise undefended properties? Resources that if not pre-positioned in the town may not be able to get there due to the areas of forest the three major roads to Lorne pass through?
There are contradictions in this community information guide that coupled with the hype the news media gives to bushfire events and community warnings can only serve to confuse or frighten the vast majority of people unfamiliar with bushfire behaviour.
Extend this to the numerous other towns and settlements in Victoria covered by similar community information guides and the potential is there for enormous property loss. Much of this property loss could be avoided if the government insisted on resources being committed to site-specific real fire behaviour education and mentoring of the large army of people within these at-risk communities — if necessary by diverting money from firefighting equipment and fire station building programs.
The “downstream” consequences of property loss seems to have been overlooked by the government, Marysville being one notable example. The loss of the family home or a business is just as injurious to the individuals involved and ultimately costly to the broader community. Preferable that the loss be avoided in the first place.
Unfortunately, the unhelpful broad-brush attitude of the government in dealing with development in areas subject to the Bushfire Management Overlay can be aligned to the no-risk “everybody out” approach.