Month: January 2003

Bits of burnt gum leaves lie on the ground all over South Canberra. Indeed, you can find them in virtually every part of Canberra.

So maybe the whole of Canberra is a bushfire prone area, and from here on we should build houses accordingly.

At present there is an Australian Standard for construction in bushfire prone areas. It is compulsory in areas declared by state governments and local authorities as bushfire prone. But no areas on the urban fringe of Canberra were so declared at the time of the January 18 bushfires.

It is time to be wise after the event – not only with bushfires but with reconstruction generally.

There will be pressures not to. They will largely be driven by short-term cost considerations. But those burnt leaves help illustrate the balance of cost. The expense of sealing eaves, meshing vents or even making fences of steel or masonry is trivial compared to the loss of the whole house.

Archicentre, the building advisory service of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, lays out some simple principles:

* Build on flat ground on a concrete slab. If you build on a slope fit the house into the slope rather than have it supported on poles.

* Build where there is a fuel break around the home.
Continue reading “2003_01_january_reconstruction”

On the burnt, twisted metal of a garage door amid the wreckage of a house in Jindabyne Street, Duffy, are the roughly painted words in bright red:

Land for Sale. 13 Fireball St Duffy.

That land was first sold in the late 1960s or early 1970s as Canberra stretched further south and west into the treeless Woden Valley and Weston Creek.

In those days land cost next to nothing. The prize blocks along Eucumbene Drive with views over the city went for as little as $1000 in 1971. The entire infrastructure was in place. Electricity, water and sewerage were laid on and the streets laid out. What irony – given the firestorm last Saturday — that the streets in Duffy are all named after dams, lakes and water reserves. The charred remains around the streets of western Duffy are a different world from the cool clear waters of Eucumbene Dam, Jindabyne Dam, Lake Cargelligo, Jemalong Weir and Lake Eildon after which they were named when the suburb was laid out according to best planning practice at the time.

Some of that practice undoubtedly contributed to the high toll of houses in the fire. But that is no cause for radical change or the abandonment of planning the city.

Just as there was a freak confluence of conditions that made the fire so ferocious in the first place, there was a combination of planning and building factors that made the toll on houses worse when the fire got here. The heat, winds, drought and Canberra’s good response to water restrictions in allowing gardens to dry out were predominant factors, but if you build a Bush Capital bush fires come with the territory.
Continue reading “2003_01_january_duffy fires”

Canberra has the best infrastructure of any city in Australia. It is the best planned city in Australia. Yet the bushfire at the weekend claimed more houses than any other bushfire in Australia’s history. The official count yesterday was 388 houses, but it is likely to pass 400.

The key to it is the word itself – BUSHfire. (SUBS: italic bush please)

In Australia, bushfires often claim the odd rural dwelling or half a dozen houses or so when a bushfire comes to the edge of a town or city.

But Canberra is a different city. It is known as the Bush Capital. So if your city is bush, then it, too, will subject to bushfire – in a way that other towns and cities will not. In other places, the fire hits the edge of town and stops.
Continue reading “2003_01_january_canberra’s fires”