What we are seeing is very similar to what has happened in Portugal several times in the last few years but on an even vaster scale.

Despite the fact that I was born in England and now live in Italy from the age of 2 years I grew up in the Northern outskirts of Sydney. At that time the conventional wisdom was that if you lived in a bushland area you did not have trees around your house, the brush was periodically burned, in the case of a fire, if you had the water, you stopped up the gutter downpipes with tennis balls and filled the gutters with water, if possible covered the windows to stop flying burning debris breaking the glass or radiant heat setting fire to the curtains.

If you were in a bushfire prone area you constructed in fire resistant materials and took measures to make sure burning debris could not be blown into areas that could take fire.

In my late teens and early 20s I was both part of a Civil Defence Rescue Squad and a volunteer bushfire fighter and twice I have narrowly escaped severe burns and had to run for my life losing only a little singed hair (that I had in those days) I firetruck driver, on one occasion, opted to stay in the truck, and had radiant heat burns on one side of his face. The paint on one side of the truck was all blistered and when we returned to the truck the fuel in the tank for the petrol driven pump was boiling!

Since those days the city has expanded even more into the surrounding bushland areas, controlled burnoffs of scrub have been banned, and people not only have retained as much bushland as possible near their houses but they have also planted trees right next to the houses. All very beautiful, wonderfully ecological, but ignores the fact that houses are not part of the natural ecosystem. These houses surrounded or deep in bushland and forests are very desirable and people love to be surrounded by the wildlife and tranquillity of these locations but unfortunately they do not often understand the risks involved.

In my brief career as a fire-fighter we only lost one house, that had been abandoned after the owners had passed on, and that was a decision that I made to avoid the risk to my squad. It left me deeply saddened even though I knew it was abandoned and uninhabited. My heart really goes out to all those who have lost everything.

Peter

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