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If you plan to stay and defend your property during bushfire season, or it’s too late to leave town, you’ve come to the right place. Bushfires are a natural phenomenon that the Australian ecosystem has evolved to thrive on.
However, they are a threat to humans, animals, and property. With climate change and human intervention, bushfires rage worse than ever before. That is why we have prepared this list of ten ways you can protect your property during a bushfire so there is less damage to cope with after the fire.
Soak Everything
To protect your home from approaching firefronts, the best practice is to wet the forest or fauna around your home to stop the spread of the fire. Soaking the outside of your house walls is also a good idea. Use a hose and water the earth around your home as well.
Australian bushfires spread due to the dry weather and vegetation. So, wetting everything acts as a barrier to the spread of fire. It is not foolproof and might only slow down the spread of flames. Also, line the doors and windows with soaking-wet blankets.
Keep Everything Neat and Trim
There should be little to no combustible material outside your home. To achieve this, you must clean up around your home regularly to ensure there are no dry leaves, twigs, or trash around. You must also ensure that trees that overhang your house are trimmed. There should be no branches that reach your home.
This is also how your home would look best, so it’s good to keep up this clean-up routine all year round instead of just in fire season. Last-minute cleaning is nearly impossible in such emergency conditions. However, if you have time, do your best to trim away trees and clean up material near your home.
Get a Fire Fighting Unit For Your Car
Anyone is ready to take risks to protect their property. To illustrate the level of threat bushfires pose, consider that in the Australian bushfires in 2019-20, there was a total insurance loss of $2.3 billion across 38,000 claims. Also, with the subsequent drop in tourism, 7300 jobs were lost. So, it’s time to fight back!
If you wish to fight the fires yourself or aid the firefighters in the area, you can purchase a slip-on or skid-on fire fighting unit for your truck, trailer, or ute. These reliable fire fighting units for emergencies can be filled with anywhere from 220L to 2400L of water.
Use Fire Resistant Paint
Our last tip is to invest in fire-resistant paint for the interior and exterior of your home. With the latest innovations in fire-resistant technology driven by the bushfire crisis, fire-resistant paint can now be found with a fireproof rating of BAL-40.
That means that the paint can protect your walls from embers or debris blown in from the wind, high levels of radiant heat up to 40 kW/m2, and, to some degree, direct assault from a firefront. All in all, it’s better to be safe than to be sorry, so using fire-resistant paint can minimize the damage done to your property.
