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...that apart from not planting trees near the house, they will not do anything differently. "All these bushfire prevention ideas are a load of rubbish," he says. "The brick houses were just as burnt as the timber ones. It doesn't matter what the house is made of. A fire like that will destroy everything in its path...
...have been so desperately unprepared for this one. Last February, the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission was quickly established to investigate what went wrong. Though their report is not due until later this year, one of the failings could have been a decades-old evacuation policy advocated by the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council (AFAC) known as 'stay or go.' The policy encourages individuals confronted with bushfires to leave early, or stay behind and defend their property, with the reasoning that last-minute evacuations result in deaths...
...last year, 113 out of the 173 deceased died in their homes. The "stay or go" approach has a long history in rural Australia, and gradually became official policy after the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires in southeastern Australia. "If someone was present in a house, it had a 90% chance of surviving the fire - protecting the occupants in the process - while many perished leaving at the last minute," says John Handmer, director of the Centre for Risk and Community Safety at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology who conducted a review of the 'stay or go' policy for the Bushfire...
...Despite the fact that so many died in their homes last year following this logic, Handmer's study, in which he and his colleague Josh Whittaker interviewed 1,300 survivors from last year's fires, found that 80% of those who stayed would do it again. "It's really difficult to make a conclusion on 'stay or go,'" said Handmer. "It's supported by history but new building styles, building locations [close to the bush], reliance on fire agencies and perhaps increased fire weather risk, make effective implementation very difficult. There's no point staying and defending a house that...
...Another factor contributing to the devastation was the outdated warning scheme then used throughout the country. The Forest Fire Danger Index (FDI), invented by scientist Alan McArthur in the 1960s, evaluates the difficulty in extinguishing fires under various combinations of temperature and wind. For most of years since it's been used, an FDI warning of 50 out of 100 points indicated that an area was at extreme risk. But in recent years, there have been many days where the index has hovered around the 100 mark, a shift some attribute to climate change. On Feb. 7, when...