Bushfire

Preparing Your Home And Family For Bushfire Season

With today’s severe fire weather condition warning, it’s the perfect time to prepare your home and family for the upcoming fire season.

Summer is almost here. For most of us it means beach trips and BBQs with friends. It also brings much hotter weather and the chance of bushfires.

The Country Fire Service is bracing for severe fire weather conditions across large parts of South Australia today, so it’s the perfect time to ensure your family and home are prepared for the coming fire season.

Preparing Your Home For Summer

Preparation for bushfire season should be a year-round task, but if you haven’t started yet, here are some tips to help as a guide and remember it’s never too late to make preparations to protect your home and family.

  1. Trees and plants provide fuel for fires. Remove the build up of dead branches, bark or shrubs
  2. If you’re planting a garden, plant trees away from the house so limbs and branches don’t hang over your roof and drop leaves in gutters. These can ignite quickly if burning embers fall on them.
  3. Clean leaves from your roof, gutters and downpipes
  4. Remove all flammable material that is within 20 metres of your property. This includes flammable liquids and newspapers or cardboard that you have stockpiled for recycling.

“No-one wants to be impacted by a bushfire. Often there is nothing that can be done to stop damage, but if you follow the above small tips you will have at least given your place every chance of surviving if a bushfire is in your area.

“All Australians should be removing any dead and dry material around their property. People should also trim low lying branches two metres from the ground”, said Lachlan Adams, Co-Founder, MyGenerator.com.au.

What To Do In A Bushfire Situation

There are a number of items that can help in a bushfire situation:

  • During a bushfire, power and water may be cut off and this often happens in advance. A small power generator will allow your family access to small appliances and allow laptops and phones to continue to be charged.
  • Portable battery radios allow people to listen to news updates
  • Good quality torches and long life batteries are imperative
  • Packed bag with fresh clothes which can be easily carried
  • A quality high-pressure fire fighting pump to help with any small spot fires and to water your garden/foliage on your property in preparation

“If you do live in a bushfire zone please organise a bushfire plan with your family and make sure everyone knows what it is, where they need to go if they get separated and what items they can grab quickly if they are forced to evacuate”, concluded Adams.

The CFS has a very helpful 5-Minute Bushfire Plan that will help you get your plan together. You can access that here.

They also suggest that you plan to leave early on days that are forecast as Catastrophic and only stay and defend on a day of Extreme Fire Danger if you are extremely well prepared and your home is properly constructed.

Remeber, be vigilant, and in the event of a fire call 000.

To be on the look out, you can access the incident map here.

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