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How to fireproof your home

With proper property planning and a managed garden you can reduce the potential damage and go a long way in fire-proofing your house from a bushfire.

 

Property Design

  • Managing the vegetation around your home can be the difference between losing your house in a bushfire or not. Houses usually burn down as a result of sparks and embers landing on your house and sparking fires. You can improve the chances of your home surviving a bushfire by following some simple design tips below.

 

Survival Tips

  • Position low fuel areas around the house. Things such as driveways, pools, green lawns, graveled areas of cultivated soils can help protect your house.

  • Plant trees away from your house so that limbs and branches won’t hang over the roof and drop leaves in the gutters that will ignite if burning embers connect. Try and keep trees and shrubs 2m apart so that there isn’t a continuous canopy which would carry fire to the house.

  • Consider where the wind would most likely come from as this indicates the most likely direction from which the fire will approach. Now plant trees to provide a non –flammable windbreak where the fires are expected to come from. This will reduce wind from the rear of the house and reduce the fire’s intensity and the rate at which it spreads. It will also intercept burning embers carried by the wind.

  • Ensure good access to water for fire fighting.


 

Reduce fire fuel

  • Your trees and plants provide fuel for fires. However, it is the finer fuels such as dry grass, leaves and twigs that act as a conduit connecting the fire with other sources of fuel. Therefore, minimizing fine fuels will reduce these fine fuels by mowing, raking, slashing and clearing grasses and removing the accumulation of dead branches, bark or shrubs around your house. Regular plant pruning is essential to remove dead and dry material and promote lush new growth.

 

Plant Selection

  • All plants burn differently but the rule of thumb is that all plants burn. In planning your garden, look for plants that have smooth bark, large leaves that are moist and succulent or high in salt content and species that don’t have a lot of oil glands in the leaves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Fig Services - tel: 0415 090 672 – email: info@redfig.com.au – PO Box 459, Double Bay, 1360