THE RECENT BUSHFIRES HAVE WREAKED HAVOC ON LOCAL COMMUNITIES, DESTROYING PROPERTY AND LEAVING RESIDENTS TO RETURN TO THEIR HOMES WITH THE SCARRED LANDSCAPE A LONG TERM REMINDER; AND THEY ARE THE LUCKY ONES.
We had four bushfire evacuees, and their cats, live with us during the Mundaring fires. Their trauma during those first days when they didn’t know if they had a home to return to is hard to explain. Ironically the house was not their major concern as it was insured and they had their photographs. It was the things that had been left behind they spoke of; had the new bike been destroyed, did the washing on the line burn and, would the guinea pig survive?
They were amongst the lucky ones; their neighbours weren’t and lost everything.
Fires that cause high levels of property loss trigger inevitable questioning; were the fires fought appropriately? What could we do better? The enormous courage of the fire fighters and the detailed coordination left few questions to ask in that area, so some attention has been turned to current bushfire policies for urban development.
In 2010 the Department of Planning, in conjunction with the Fire and Emergency Services Authority, released Bush Fire Protection Guidelines (Edition 2). The Guideline details what needs to be considered in planning decisions related to rezoning, subdivision design and development assessment.
Those Guidelines are currently under review following the Keelty Report released after the 2011 fires. Whilst the current subdivision process has high regard for bush fire risk, consistent with the policy, areas that were developed over previous decades have seen risk increase since the homes were originally constructed for a range of reasons including to our drying climate.
For new developments UDIA believes that there should be a dual policy approach; one which addresses the peri-urban areas with large lots and significant areas of retained vegetation, and another which looks at areas identified for urbanisation. There are many differences, for example, in peri-urban areas deemed appropriate for development, increased housing construction standards are a common sense approach. However, where an area is being subdivided which will be surrounded by other urban development, fire breaks could be cleared and maintained to the prescribed distances (where there is agreement with neighbouring landholders) until that land is developed, rather than mandating expensive housing construction standards which may become redundant in months.
This is a tough, emotive policy issue and we welcome the government’s review.