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    Landscape and Building Design for Bushfire Areas
    Landscape and Building Design for Bushfire Areas
    Landscape and Building Design for Bushfire Areas
    Ebook208 pages1 hour

    Landscape and Building Design for Bushfire Areas

    By Caird Ramsay and Lisle Rudolph

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    About this ebook

    Shortlisted in TAFE Vocational Education category in the 2004 Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing.

    The devastation wreaked by bushfires on Australian homes and landscapes is an all too familiar scenario. Yet, why do we often see one house burn, whilst an apparently similar house on an adjacent block can endure? Research has shown that many factors affect the chances of a building surviving a bushfire. If you are designing landscapes and buildings in bushfire areas you need to be aware of these factors so that the chances of losses to life and property can be minimised.

    Landscape & Building Design for Bushfire Areas integrates the latest scientific knowledge about buildings and bushfires with a flexible design approach.

    The book contains two main sections:
    1) Provides a clear description of what happens in a bushfire. It describes the environment in which bushfires occur, how a fire attacks, and how buildings are ignited and destroyed.
    2) Sets out a practical design approach to the design of buildings and their immediate surroundings. It presents a range of options for designing the various elements of both landscapes and buildings in bushfire-prone areas.

    This book encourages design for bushfire to be included as a normal part of designing in bushfire-prone areas, rather than as an undesirable add-on. It will assist planning and building regulatory authorities to improve and administer regulatory requirements and guidelines.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCSIRO PUBLISHING
    Release dateNov 25, 2003
    ISBN9780643098817
    Landscape and Building Design for Bushfire Areas

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      Book preview

      Landscape and Building Design for Bushfire Areas - Caird Ramsay

      Section one

      What happens in

      a bushfire?

      This section describes the environment in which bushfires occur and the problems facing people living in areas prone to bushfire. It explains how bushfires attack, how buildings ignite and the relevant attributes of vegetation.

      Chapter 1: Introduction

      Every bushfire season in Australia increases the urgency to design buildings and their landscape settings so that they are better adapted to their environments.

      This chapter touches on some of the responses of people to the risk of bushfire in bushfire-prone areas and lists some common misconceptions. The chapter also describes the design approach used in this manual.

      Planning and building regulations — a cautionary note

      Before proceeding to develop any proposals, designers should first check all planning requirements that have to be met, covering factors such as zoning, siting of buildings and management of vegetation. A similar check should be made with regard to all building regulations. In all cases, these requirements take precedence over anything contained in this manual.

      Designers should also refer to the Australian Standard AS 3959 – 1999 and amendments, Construction of Buildings in Bushfire-prone Areas, which is the current edition at the time of writing this manual. This Standard is a primary reference standard for the Building Code of Australia (BCA) which applies throughout Australia, and there are variations to it at both State and local levels.

      However, this manual may provide information which facilitates the design of ‘alternative solutions’ under the BCA performance approach.

      Bushfire hazard in Australia

      Australia, like most parts of the world, has its share of natural hazards, including earthquakes, cyclones, droughts, and bushfires. Large bushfires also occur in several other regions of the world including California, Southern France, Central Spain, Russia and China. Australian bushfires can be particularly large, severe and destructive. In Australia, the climate and the vegetation combine each year to produce fire-hazardous conditions across vast areas. When concentrations of flammable vegetation, high temperature, low humidity and very strong wind all occur together, they set the stage for a serious and destructive bushfire.

      Adapting to bushfire

      Aboriginal Australians were well adapted to their environment, and they used fire to assist in hunting and food gathering. On the other hand the Europeans who first began to settle in Australia would not have encountered fires on such a scale before, and must have feared them. Uncertainty and fear remain with many people today. At the same time there are others who are gradually coming to accept bushfire as part of their country through increased understanding of what happens in bushfire.

      The most recent development has been to plan to prepare buildings and their surroundings so that, when a bushfire does come, it will be less destructive and people will be better able to survive. An essential requirement for this to happen is the knowledge about how buildings are ignited and destroyed in a bushfire.

      This knowledge has been slow in coming for several reasons. The limited amount of research on the ignition of buildings may be due, in part, to the infrequent occasions on which researchers have had the opportunity to study a sufficient number of buildings at any one time to provide statistical reliability, and to the difficulties inherent in this type of research. One of the first significant studies undertaken was in 1944 after a fire in Beaumaris, an outer suburb of Melbourne, but the findings were relatively inconclusive.

      A major step forward in the research came after the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 16 January 1983. On that day in Victoria and South Australia 76 people died, 2463 houses were destroyed and 360,000 hectares of land were burned. The cost of the damage has been estimated at $440 million, not to mention the human costs of trauma and disruption to people’s lives.

      In the Ash Wednesday fires, the very large number of buildings that were either destroyed, ignited but not destroyed, or not ignited at all, provided a statistically large sample. Some fairly reliable conclusions were able to be drawn about the ignition and destruction of buildings. These are elaborated in Chapter 3 in this manual, ‘Ignition and destruction of buildings’.

      Community responses to bushfire risk

      Communities respond to the risk of bushfire in various ways. Many rural communities are familiar with fires, have much at stake if burned out, and they prepare for them regularly. In other areas, particularly the expanding urban fringes, people are less likely to be aware of bushfires. Within each community there will be a range of personal responses as well.

      The following table shows the different ways in which communities and individuals can respond. It also shows the area of activities which this manual deals with.

      Responses to the risk of bushfire

      Individual responses to bushfire risk

      It is difficult to know to what extent individuals are currently conscious of the risk of bushfire, and what they are doing, if anything, to prepare their properties for the possibility of a bushfire. Undoubtedly, a bushfire does increase the awareness of people for a few years afterwards but then, as vegetation grows back quickly and normality returns, awareness and preparedness decline.

      There are probably several reasons for this decline. One reason may be a healthy tendency not to dwell on the hazards and negatives of life. Nevertheless this does not reduce the need for reliable information to be available to those who do want to increase their preparedness and the peace of mind that goes with that. The successful efforts of some people will eventually spread and become conventional wisdom to others.

      Appropriate form of information

      Another reason for lack of action may be the information available. Some people may be well aware of the hazards, but may be confused by the information or the form in which it is available. While there are a number of publications about buildings and bushfires, people may have difficulty in applying the information to their own individual situations. For example some advice offered describes all of the many measures that can be taken as things that ‘should’ be done. The reasons why they should be done are often not given, nor are alternative courses of action offered.

      The result may be a list of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ that is long, intimidating and in some cases too expensive and inappropriate for the individual situations.

      A design approach

      The design approach taken in this manual first states the objectives that need to be achieved, and then offers a range of design options (solutions) to achieve them. People can then choose the options that fit in with the rest of their designs. Furthermore they can also decide to reject any advice knowingly on the basis that they are aware of the problem and the likely extent of the risks they are taking.

      For example, one objective in bushfire areas is to deal with the risk of buildings being ignited in the sub-floor space. The problem can be eliminated by the use of a concrete slab-on-ground floor. If a timber floor is desired for some reason, such as a steeply sloping site, then there are other design options, such as enclosing the sub-floor space with non-combustible materials and/or managing the vegetation nearby. A non-design approach might simply state, ‘use concrete slab-on-ground for floors’.

      Common misconceptions

      Another reason for lack of preparation for bushfires may be a number of misconceptions about buildings and bushfires. There seem to be several common misconceptions in circulation.

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