- Title:
-
Fire Science and Society at the Urban/Rural Interface
- Date:
- June 2006
- Organisations
- CSIRO
- Authors:
- A.Malcolm Gill
- Location:
- Australia, Australia
Overview
Bushfire Conference 2006 – Brisbane, 6-9
June 2006
The drama of urbaninterface fire is a feature of summer newscasts in southeastern Australia. Firesuppression agencies report fire threats to homes and their calculated responses to them. At another level, scientists grapple with the problems of predicting fire spread, recommending houseconstruction methods, advocating humansafety measures and anticipating environmental effects. Householders can be largely unaware of a fire threat or have expectations of total protection courtesy of suppression agencies. Houses can burn down and fatalities can occur: this paper considers a number of the issues surrounding this ‘bushfire problem’.
Using examples based on the fire event experienced under extreme weather in Canberra, Australia, in 2003, simple models and calculations are presented for: the fireawareness of householders; the proportion of ‘knowledgeable’ householders; capacity of the brigade suppression system; demands for water from the mains; and, house loss in relation to householder occupancy during fire.
The general sociopolitical problem is how to meet a rare, extreme, short term demand for resources that far exceeds normal supply. The assumption that householders need to be self reliant is apparent. The general scientific problem is one of too many variables and too few data for statistical analysis.
