so sorry you lost your house ladyberg .. i bet you'd like to have a bulldozer in the garage now too
hoosaberg ive seen a bunker built in a low catchment area with too much ground water it was on aca or some program like that. the people who paid for it to be built were complaining it was 1/3 full of water the whole time.
at first i felt sorry for them.. but .. is it really a bad thing to have water in your fire bunker .. no not at all. they were expecting nice pillows and comfort i think.
you could make an underground concrete "tank" have some water stored in it say 30% full so you could hop in if needed and pump out from there first.. should take care of council red tape
the main thing missing from the official guidelines is a provision for somewhere to shelter at the entrance. ie a concrete wall and roof building with a labyrinth door (like on public amenities) above the actual bunker in order to be able to enter and leave the safe underground cavity without being affected by radiant heat or embers. you also need an airtight insulated door and a second door also airtight within like an airlock. these can be part of the building on top.
the stories of bureaucracy and the shiny shoes bigwigs making bad decisions and getting everything wrong in these fires just keep rolling in .. its the biggest monumental collective stuff up with fire that wa has ever seen. some of the locals with firefighting experience and a position in the brigades tried to explain things to the fat cuntrolers, police were asked to remove him from meetings.. thats just a tiny bit of it.
air support was "busy" on monday becasue of a fire near albany. local cropduster pilots were told by dfes they would loose their liscences if they flew near the fire. one or two cropdusters could have stopped all the fires on sunday
a dozer fell off a truck onto a press car, after the "ban" on local equipment the official approved earth moving equipment was brought long haul taking forever .. and then the drivers had to spend 17 hours washing them before being allowed to help.
then there was an exclusion on local equipment and only approved equipment from perth could be used by approved operators, these took 24hours to arrive then they worked set hours and took the keys out of the equipment at night.. the fire got away many times because of this idiocy
a perth crew lit up the wrong side of a break, the majority start at 9am have food piddle around and go home early, anytime the actual fire got close they were ordered to get out, as a result the town was saved by a few local trucks.
a labourer on my neighbours block was told that he had to leave at the last minute and that his house would be taken care of .. they sent him off driving through the fire and then were ordered to do the same thing .. house burnt about 30 min after the front passed ... of course
there are hundreds of stories like this .. all totally ridiculous.
some people (mostly locals) are interested in putting fires out. the rest of those involved from afar are interested in other things .. none of which are useful
