Kevin Tolhurst has described the risk plainly and specifically for the Brown Hill suburb, its streets, and its housing. But can you see yourself in such a situation? As most Brown Hill residents have never experienced a bushfire, it means, to imagine such a situation, needs to be built from everyday life, not from fire. Unfortunately, imagination here does not help.

Why does this happen? A quick biology lesson: Our brain creates imagination by recombining past memories and sensory experiences. Because we cannot fully replicate an unfamiliar sensory feeling, we struggle to mentally simulate it. For a bushfire, we can recall heat and smoke, but we cannot imagine the crushing overwhelm without experiencing it. For a bushfire event there genuinely is no opportunity for a dress rehearsal.  

When imagination cannot help

Researchers have grappled with this for many years and they have come up with a partial answer to the rehearsal problem: other people’s testimony. First-hand accounts can do something that statistics and risk tables cannot. They can make the abstract concrete and the future present. The following accounts and sentiments frequently expressed by survivors are:

• “We never thought it would happen to us”: Most survivors note that despite seeing smoke or hearing warnings, they assumed the fire would bypass their specific property or town. They often acknowledge experiencing “normalcy bias,” leading to delayed evacuations or inadequate preparation.

“Normalcy bias” is a mental bias where the human brain underestimates the likelihood of a disaster and its potential impact. Driven by a desire for predictability, it causes people to believe that “things will continue as they have in the past”, leading them to ignore warning signs, downplay threats, and delay taking protective action.

• “It was worse than we ever expected”: Survivors consistently emphasise that the ferocity, speed, heat, and roaring noise of a catastrophic bushfire are impossible to imagine. Many describe the experience as apocalyptic or biblical, noting that standard fire plans quickly fell apart in the chaos… the choking smoke, a darkness in the middle of the day that a torch cannot penetrate.

• When people lose their homes in a bushfire they consistently say the same thing. “It wasn’t the structure they grieved. It was everything the structure held.” ‘It wasn’t just a house. It was a home. Our home.’

• In Los Angeles, a woman fleeing the Palisades fire grabbed her dog and her laptop. She left behind a scrapbook of her mother, who had died when she was six years old. And the handprints and footprints of a son she had lost. These are the things that cannot be insured. They are what ‘home’ actually means.

In the weeks that followed, as the fire threat continued, she observed what sustained uncertainty does to people: “Many people were wracked with indecision and second guessed themselves… the immediate and confrontational nature of the experience left many feeling uncertain as to what was the best course of action. We were panicked.” Source: “Understanding the Experience of an Extreme Event: A Personal Reflection

Other first hand accounts can be found through out this video: CFA Documentary “Being Mentally Prepared”

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In the aftermath of the Black Summer fires, ABC Four Corners put together interviews and footage of life-or-death moments posted by people in real time from inside the inferno.

Access interviews & footage here.

One of those interviewed was India MacDonell who helped her dad save their house in East Gippsland. It was India’s first time at the end of a hose. India watched from their roof as the fire approached and thought it looked “almost spectacular”. But the firestorm was far worse than expected. this is what she recorded. (Source: India’s Facebook page)

 

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“Yes, I know embers.”

Another key take away from Kevin Tolhurst’s assessments was that ember attack was the main threat. For most of us we could say, “Yes, I know embers.” I see them when I put a log on a fire, sometimes they can be annoying if they land on bare skin. This is our every day experience of embers. This is NOT an ember attack!

 

This is how Malcolm Hackett OAM, who lost his own property on Black Saturday, describes ember attack: “I tended to think of embers as a single thing that might get in and start a fire. But in fact, embers come like a sandstorm and they build up against things and so, in the end, you’ve got this red-hot stuff that’s actually going to ignite your window frame, or your mulch, or whatever it happens to land on.”

 

ABC News video: 9 September 2019: Ember attack during bushfire on the Sunshine Coast. Click on image below

The Canberra 2003 fires destroyed houses in the urban-rural fringe suburbs with the same housing profile as Brown Hill: large houses on medium blocks, timber fencing, gardens with combustible ground cover, close to bushland. The CSIRO field survey of 229 houses found that no house showed evidence of direct flame contact from the fire front. Of the houses that were destroyed, over 90% were lost to ember attack alone, or ember attack combined with radiant heat from adjacent burning structures.

Overall, 47% of the surveyed houses were destroyed. The same survey found that if no suppression activity had occurred in the hours after the fire front passed, house loss would likely have approached 100%. The actual loss rate was 47%. The difference was human intervention, residents and fire services, during the ember phase.

The difference between houses that survived and those that didn’t was not luck. There were identifiable reasons — and most of them were within the control of the resident, in the weeks before the fire arrived.

This video is unedited footage taken by Channel Nine cameraman, Chris McKee, during a ride through the fires with A.C.T. Fire Brigade District Officer Darrell Thornthwaite. It is taken from ACT Fire Brigade perspective.

It is 45 minutes long, it starts off calm with expectation as the fire moves towards the westerly edge of Canberra’s suburbs; it then moves into heightened alarm with the darkening sky, ember storm and houses on fire; then into chaos of doing the best they could; you notice cars on the roads, residents desperately trying to save their houses; stunned survivors wondering the streets; and eventually things settle into more order to save what they could.

All of it is worth watching, on a full screen and volume high. Click on the image to access video (you will need to move it along a bit at the beginning)

Every fire safety message you will hear focuses on the worst-case day — the kind that generates a royal commission. That framing, while not wrong, can work against preparation. If the only fire worth preparing for is one that may never arrive in your lifetime, it is too easy to put it off. Here is what the data actually shows.  Since Australia’s current fire danger rating system was introduced in September 2022, Victoria has recorded Catastrophic fire danger on just a handful of days across two fire seasons. Extreme fire danger days have been recorded roughly seven to ten times per season — approximately once a fortnight through the fire season, somewhere in Victoria.

The historical record tells the same story. Looking at Victorian fire events with significant documented house losses or fatalities since 1983, roughly twice as many occurred under Extreme conditions as under Catastrophic. The 1997 Dandenong Ranges fires (43 homes destroyed, 3 deaths), the 2015 Wye River fires (116 homes) — both Extreme days, not Catastrophic ones. These are the fire days residents need to prepare for.

Kevin Tolhurst, said it directly:  “We shouldn’t just be focused on Catastrophic conditions — even under High or Extreme fire danger ratings we could have hundreds of houses lost.” 

Preparation is however, identical either way. Every action that reduces your risk on an Extreme day  is exactly the same action that gives your house its best chance on a Catastrophic day. There is no version of preparing for Extreme that leaves you worse off if Catastrophic arrives. Source: The Bottom line

Dr Kevin Tolhurst, extract from risk assessment: “One of the things that is likely to happen — and we have the experience of the Canberra fires in 2003 and more recently the Wye River Fire in 2015 — is that a lot of the houses were lost from house-to-house ignition. People’s gardens are burning, sitting close to their house, and the house itself is the biggest fuel load in the environment, unless you’re able to stop one house’s fire from spreading to the neighbour’s house… When houses are closer than about ten metres to each other, they become a real threat to their neighbours.”

Dr Justin Leonard’s research establishes that at house separations of 3-6 metres in urban-rural fringe suburbs, like Brown Hill; a single burning house can directly ignite the next. Once a house is burning, it generates sustained radiant heat on adjacent structures for an hour or more, far longer than the passage of a fire front. Even though you may think you’ve built your house to a high standard, it’s not necessarily going to withstand a house-to-house ignition circumstance. It is therefore important to understand this specific risk to where you chose to live, either intentionally or not. This is a dilemma and not a comfortable position for residents.

A 2023 peer-reviewed paper in PNAS – co-authored by Jack Cohen – makes the argument that should sit at the foundation of all urban fringe fire guidance: “These problem fires were defined as an issue of wildfires (bushfires) that involved houses. In reality, they are urban fires initiated by wildfires. That’s an important distinction.”

This matters enormously for northside estates. If the problem is a bushfire, the solutions are landscape-scale — fuel reduction, vegetation management, fire front suppression — and individual residents can do little. If the problem is an urban fire initiated by bushfire, the solutions are at the structure and its immediate surrounds — exactly where residents have control.

The paper’s central finding: extreme wildfire is largely inevitable and largely uncontrollable. What determines whether a community is destroyed is not the fire — it is the condition of the structures and their immediate surroundings. Same fire conditions, two outcomes: vulnerable structures produce urban conflagration; ignition-resistant structures survive. The wildfire sets the stage. The community defines the outcome.

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Two independent research traditions arrived at the same conclusion. American fire researcher Jack Cohen (USDA) found that houses do not primarily ignite from radiant heat — they ignite from embers landing in and around the structure. The decisive zone is not the distant bushland; it is the immediate area around the house, almost entirely within the resident’s control. His finding, which became the basis of the Home Ignition Zone concept – houses do not primarily ignite from the radiant heat of an approaching fire front. They ignite from embers — landing in and around the structure itself… It is the immediate area surrounding the house. And that zone is almost entirely within the resident’s control.

Dr Justin Leonard at CSIRO reached the same conclusion through a different route: systematic post-fire surveys of more than 1,800 houses across three major Australian fires, including Canberra 2003, Sydney 1994 and Ash Wednesday 1983. His finding is precise: in the Canberra 2003 fires, no house in the surveyed area showed evidence of direct flame contact from the fire front itself. Over 90% of losses were caused by ember attack, alone or in combination with radiant heat from adjacent burning structures. The fire front was not what destroyed those houses. The fire front passed. Houses burned down hours later from small ignitions that were not caught.

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In the following video Jack Cohen explains how he developed the Home Ignition Zone (HIZ) concept.

Your decisive zone is therefore not the 30-metre buffer. It is the area immediately surrounding the house – what Jack Cohen defines as the Home Ignition Zone, and what his 2025 BRI presentation with Justin Leonard identified specifically as Zone Zero: the 0–1.5 metres immediately against the structure itself. It requires no council permits, no large budget, no vegetation management at landscape scale. What it requires is attention to specific, identifiable ignition pathways: the gap under the garage door, the bark mulch in the garden bed against the house wall, the timber fence connecting boundary to structure, the accumulated debris in gutters and under decks.

Justin Leonard’s formulation from the 2025 BRI webinar is direct: “If you haven’t got your house and its immediate surroundings in complete order, all the rest of the work in the broader landscape is dramatically diminished in relevance and usefulness.”

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The urban-rural fringe compromise: where zones overlap

The Home Ignition Zone research sets out an ideal: a clear Zone Zero immediately against your house, managed zones extending to 30 metres. On a northside estate block, you can reach your neighbour’s fence before you reach Zone One. This is not a failure of preparation. It is the structural reality of estate housing — and it changes what “lowering your risk” means.

Your Zone Zero is yours to control, and it is the highest-value action available to you. But your full ember risk extends beyond your boundary — into zones that belong to your neighbours, just as theirs extend into yours. This diagram is northside equivalent. Every house’s ignition zone overlaps with the houses around it.

In a potential house-to-house fire scenario with a 3–6 metre separation between houses – one burning house directly threatens the next. Your Zone Zero preparation matters most to your neighbours. Theirs matters most to you. This is not an individual problem with an individual solution. It is a street-level problem that only has a street-level answer. 

Maintain your Zone Zero and what you can in Zone 1, then talk to your neighbours. Whether any of you are there on the day or not, a street where every household has done its Zone Zero is a street that gives itself the best chance of not becoming a town fire.

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The research is compelling.  But for a resident of a northside estate who has never experienced a bushfire and has no fire frame of reference, the question underneath all of it is a simpler one: “Has anyone actually done this? And did it make a difference?”

The answer is yes and at scale, under mandatory evacuation orders, in denser and more fire-prone conditions than Brown Hill. A well established example comes from Marin County, California, and their Fire Safe Marin program. Communities whose situation maps directly onto Brown Hill in ways that matter.

Marin County sits at the urban-rural interface north of San Francisco.

Its residents live in small, densely packed subdivisions adjacent to steep, fire-prone hillsides. They operate under mandatory evacuation orders – the official advice is to leave. And yet the county has built the largest county-wide Firewise community program in the United States, currently representing around 55,000 households across more than 78 recognised Firewise community sites. The program is coordinated by Fire Safe Marin, a non-profit established in 1992. Since 2020 they have added to their program, the primary pillars of “Harden your Home” (HIZ) and Zone Zero. 

The logic driving it is explicit: leave early, yes — and harden (ember-proof) your home before you go, because that is the only thing that gives it a chance of still being there when you return. This is precisely the FireAware Network’s cornerstone argument, arrived at independently. They are operating at scale, under mandatory evacuation conditions.

Marin residents aren’t doing it instead of leaving — they’re doing it as well as leaving, because they understand the prepared empty house argument. That framing directly addresses the “we’ll just leave” objection without dismissing it.

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May 14, 2022: An Introduction to Firewise USA: Santa Barbara County Fire Safe Council developed this informative video to explain the Firewise program and the benefit it provides community members.

To learn more about the Firewise program access this link for frequently asked questions.

 

Why did I need to go to California to find an example? Because there is NO equivalent in Australia: The gap between Brown Hill and Marin County is not the research, the logic, or the resident capacity to act. The gap is simply that no equivalent program exists here. The Marin example answers northside resident’s question directly: “Has anyone actually done this?” Real communities, in real subdivisions, under mandatory evacuation orders, have taken the HIZ framework from research and are putting it into practice. The science is not theoretical. It is being tested at scale, right now, by communities whose situation closely resembles Brown Hill and northside in particular.

SECTION 5: For residents who think…

 

Fire Safe Marin shows what’s possible once the Home Ignition Zone approach is put into practice. But knowing something works doesn’t automatically translate into action — there are specific reasons people can put it off, even once convinced. The following works through the most common reasons, and what the evidence says about each.

Insurance is not a guarantee it will “cover it.” The industry itself is in crisis over exactly this kind of event: between September 2024 and December 2025, 43% of private insurers withdrew from wildfire-prone parts of California following the LA fires, pushing home owner enrolments in the state’s insurer-of-last-resort to record levels. Premiums are rising here too — Australian home insurance costs have climbed an average of 7.2% a year since 2010, and APRA projects up to one in four homes could be uninsured or underinsured for climate risk by 2050.

What’s shifted is how insurers assess that risk. For decades, wildfire pricing was based almost entirely on location. IBHS — the research arm funded by the US insurance industry itself — has moved that foundation: to what a house is made of, and what’s in the first 1.5 metres around it. It  is now understood this is the primary determinant of whether it ignites at all. Ember-proofing isn’t just a fire-safety action anymore; it’s becoming the thing that determines whether, and how affordably, a house can be insured at all.

IBHS has also recognised that individual mitigation isn’t enough at estate-style spacing — structure-to-structure spread at 3–6 metres requires street-level, not just household-level, action. Australia is roughly five to eight years behind the US in formally pricing this, but the trajectory is the same, and it’s coming.

IBHS Wildfire Prepared Program — progression timeline:

• 2022 — Wildfire Prepared Home launches: the first standard distinguishing ember-resistant homes.
• 2025 — Zone Zero (0–1.5m, noncombustible) becomes a core requirement; IBHS research confirms it cuts ignition risk in half.
• 2026 — The standard expands from individual homes to whole neighbourhoods, now covering 14 US states. IBHS: “The decisions you make to protect your home can directly affect the homes around you during a wildfire.”

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But how does this relate to Brown Hill?

The Australian insurance industry is under the same structural pressure as the US — it has arrived by a different route but the destination is identical. Weather-related insured losses exceeded $7 billion in 2022 alone. Home insurance premiums rose an average of 7.2% annually between 2010 and 2025. APRA’s March 2026 Insurance Climate Vulnerability Assessment projected that one in seven Australian houses are currently uninsured, rising to potentially one in four by 2050. The Australia Institute estimated 1.4 million homes are already uninsured or underinsured. The drivers are floods, cyclones and bushfires — the industry is not distinguishing between them, it is repricing all climate risk simultaneously.

The bushfire-specific response is now beginning. Half the Australian home insurance market prices bushfire mitigation following the launch of the Resilience Building Council certification app. APRA has named household and community-level resilience measures as a lever capable of narrowing the protection gap. ICA chief executive Andrew Hall described the certification approach as “an Australian innovation now being studied globally as proof that household-level risk reduction can help improve insurance affordability.“

Australia is five to eight years behind the US in formally linking mitigation to pricing — but the trajectory is the same. The science IBHS built its program on is identical to the science Leonard and Tolhurst established for estates like Brown Hill. The industry conclusion is coming. The research is already here.

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The above difficulties do not include the social and psychological challenges they faced. These listed difficulties were not unique to Marysville they have been repeated over and over again in small and larger communities, after every major extreme event across Australia. 

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For northside estates specifically, Tolhurst was direct: In a significant fire event, firefighting resources are scattered widely across the landscape. Springs Road, the main exit and entry point, is vulnerable to tree fall and powerline failure. A blocked road means CFA cannot reach your street any more than you can leave it. On the day that matters most, the preparation you did in the weeks before is what stands between your house and the fire.

Prepare and act as if there is no fire truck coming to rescue you. Then you won’t waste time or be surprised when one doesn’t turn up.

Your BAL rating tells you how your house was built relative to classified vegetation when the permit was issued. It does not tell you your current fire risk. It also does not tell you about ember attack risk from a neighbours burning house.

Embers travel kilometres ahead of a fire front, meaning properties well beyond the immediate bush edge, including across southside Brown Hill, can receive ember fall from a major fire event. And once houses begin to ignite, they become ember sources themselves.

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For residents who think “It won’t happen to us”

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For residents who think we will just leave

For residents who think that one house won’t matter – it’s just a house

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For residents who think that it is all too hard or too costly

Now that you understand the bushfire risk to you, your household and your home along with an understanding of why and how the Home Ignition Zone /Zone Zero principles can lower that risk here is a place to start.

Assessing the vulnerabilities of your house and yard to embers.  Why do this? Houses burn from the inside out therefore the best way to prevent your house from burning down is to not let the embers IN. This is the whole purpose of ember-proofing your house. You cannot stop embers entering unless you know where they COULD enter. The assessment is a physical walk around your house and property with the checklist to guide you, to re-aquaint you with your house with new eyes – “FireAware eyes”.

This is a looking and noting exercise – NOT a doing one. Once you understand where the vulnerabilities are then you can work out what actions are needed and the best way to do them within household limitations. One step at a time and allot a couple of hours here and there will see the list shrink quickly. Once you do this first assessment thoroughly, in following seasons the check can be a lot quicker as you know what you are looking for. Time? An afternoon?

PREPARING: ember-proofing your home– zone by zone provides more detail to help you through this process and subsequent steps to follow. Take it at your own pace and get the kids involved.

The work in Section 6 has a start date. It doesn’t have an end date. Ember-proofing isn’t a project you finish — gutters refill, mulch gets topped up, garage seals wear down, “stuff” accumulates in Zone Zero. What keeps a house protected is the same list, checked again, every year.

The trap is relying on fear to bring you back to it. A bad fire season, a smoky week, a close call — these get people moving, but the feeling fades faster than the fire danger does. What lasts is tying the check to something that happens on the calendar regardless of how anyone feels that year: the first weekend of daylight saving, when you change your smoke alarm batteries, before the school holidays start. Pick a date. Put it in your phone, not just your head.

• In winter, take advantage of the cooler weather to clean up your property and ember proof your home;
• In spring, get ready for the impending Fire Danger Season;
• During summer, maintain your preparedness through the Fire Danger Season;
• Immediate Heatwave Preparation (1–3 Days Before)

Here is your Seasonal Action Checklist to download, to help you on your way (keep it in your planning folder) :

FireAware Step 3 Seasonal Actions Checklist

None of this makes the risk go away. What it does is put you, not chance, in charge of what happens next.

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Full details live here:

• Do you know that Brown Hill is in a Bushfire Prone Area (BPA)?
• Understanding risk of a bushfire event
• Prep before plan: Home Ignition Zone & Zone Zero
• Planning: Writing your plan – time to put it all together

 

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Disclaimer: The information on this page is drawn from publicly available fire science research, expert assessments, and official guidance, and is provided in good faith to help residents understand their situation and make their own informed decisions. It is not official advice from CFA or any emergency service. Every property and household is different — residents should assess their own circumstances before acting.

Sources for this page: