Well over 80% of all the houses that are lost in these bushfires is actually lost without any of that large fire front action reaching the house.

There's always embers, there's always surface fires acting around your property, there's always wind and wind-blown debris context that either is intense enough to be a direct action in itself or simply adds an important additional context to everything else and smoke exposure is ubiquitous to all fires.

So ember attack, surface fire, adjacent buildings, and adjacent combustible objects are all the factors that actually end up playing out and being most responsible for loss in fire.

Accumulation of new dry debris happens extensively during a fire event. Unfortunately those freshly cleaned gutters end up filling up again during the fire event.

Preventing debris accumulation by design, like not having gutters or having non-combustible gutter guards that just don't allow debris accumulation, or having decks that aren't ignitable by debris accumulation, are the types of strategies I hope people consider when they're considering how to best upgrade their houses.

Embers. It is a real question of detail and understanding about "can a 2mm object get through and into either a building cavity or into the occupiable space of your home," is really the only way to unpack it and spend a lot of time understanding where all these features are.

Embers and fine debris that is reading to burn come like a sandstorm and they build up against things and so, in the end, you've got lots of small flame sources forming where event debris can access or build up, that's actually what's going to ignite your window frame, or your mulch, or whatever it happens to be.

House-to-house ignition. When houses are closer than 12m from each other your chances are elevated because you don't have to just get one house through the fire, you've got to get two or more houses through that fire, so it is a real question of a discussion at the streetscape level.