Bushfire Alert Levels can change quickly and any well-prepared plan may come unstuck in these instances. Make sure you consider as many scenarios as practical.
For example, what happens if only one person is at home and 4 are needed to enact the plan in the time frame allowed?
Rehearsing and fine tuning your plans well before bushfire season starts can be a life saving undertaking. After you have selected the Bushfire Protection Systems depending on the Bushfire Attach Level (BAL) of your home, you will need to finalise your survival plan and document your overall strategy. Remember to keep it in a place where all members of your household can find it easily. A pouch on the back of your pantry door is one suggestion.
When documenting your plan, we recommend that you include the following;
- Start the conversation. Discuss with all members of the family what to do in the event of a Bushfire - a discussion around the dinner table where everybody is together and focused.
- Prepare your home. Managing gardens and maintain the surrounding environment in advance of Bushfire Season.
- Know the NEW Fire Danger Rating System. The new ratings have been simplified from the 1 September.
Remember that there may be a delay in receiving an alert. Bushfires are known to change conditions very quickly.
- Include an evacuation plan as a contingency. Consider the time to execute all or part of your safety plan, and know if this time is greater than the estimated time for the fire to arrive. Realising it is futile to stay at the last minute may put your own life and those of your family at risk, especially if you do not have a safe plan to leave.
- Note locations of designated safe refuges as a meeting point in your area, as well as alternate routes, in the event of road closures and necessary evacuation.
- Close all BAL FZ Warrior Windows and Doors if you receive advice that a fire is in the area. This is an obvious decision that will assist to keep smoke and embers out of your home but will also assist in reducing the overall time to deploy your other survival plans.
- Deploy all Warrior FZ Bushfire Shutters if you need to leave home for any reason during a fire event and it is safe to do so. it is not recommended to travel towards the bushfire to deploy your shutters. If you have purchased the Motorised Warrior FZ Shutter, they provide the unique feature of deploying when power is shut off to your home (units with battery back up will not deploy until the backup battery is depleted after a minimum of 2 hours).
- Do not open Warrior Windows, Doors and Shutters until threat is clear and you have received advice that the fire has been extinguished.
Disclaimer: Please read this article in full and incorporate you own ideas/requirements into your survival plan. We offer this information as a guide only and it should not be relied upon as a guarantee of survival in a bushfire event. This information is not a survival plan in itself. Include closing your bushfire windows, doors and shutters and other items that require your actions as part of your total bushfire survival plan.