'Go or you may die' Aussies to be told

MELBOURNE - Victorians will be warned for the first time that they risk their lives by staying to defend their homes in a bushfire.

The 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission has recommended an overhaul of the contentious stay or go policy that includes telling residents death is a possible consequence of not evacuating early.

They would be told that getting out early is their safest option and that children, the elderly and infirm, have no place in the path of a bushfire.

Bushfires would be rated like cyclones, fire danger warnings made more explicit and town sirens reinstated.

The commission also wants emergency signals broadcast on radio and television and says fire warnings should be extended to commercial media.

Thirteen of the 51 recommendations in the interim report relate to warnings and public information.

February's Black Saturday bushfires, in which 173 people died, exposed gross failures in communication, the report said.

"Warnings were often delayed which meant that many people were not warned at all or the amount of time they had to respond to the warnings was much less than it should have been."

System crashes also meant 80 per cent of calls to the Victorian Bushfire Information Line went unanswered and large numbers of triple-zero callers could not get through.

The commission said warnings should be made relating to specific threats, distinct from information routinely relayed to the public.

A standard emergency warning signal should be adopted for radio and television to seize listeners' attention and messages should be carried by commercial media, not just the ABC, the report said.

The commission also wants more public information about bushfires that are already raging and in the lead-up to days of high fire risk.

It said a new fire severity scale should be investigated that would rate bushfires according to danger, similar to cyclone rating categories of 1 to 5.

On high-risk days, the public should be told of forest and grass fire indexes.

The commission recommended that the Country Fire Authority (CFA) provides more explicit information to residents about the risks of staying put and the requirements for defending their home, including that it may be undefendable.

"Unquestionably the safest course is always to leave early," the report said.

"For those who choose to stay and defend, the risks should be spelt out more plainly, including the risk of death.

Previously, the Government's mantra has been "people save houses, houses save lives" but that was called into question after 113 of the 173 people who died on Black Saturday were found to have sought shelter in their homes.

The commission recommended the public be educated about the "considerable effort" needed to prepare a property to make it defendable and that some properties, because of their nature and locality, would not be defendable.

"Properties also need to have a range of auxiliary equipment to bushfire standards, and an ample water supply that will not be affected by a loss of mains power," the report said.

It was recommended that the CFA have the authority to give specific advice about the defendability of individual properties and whether residents should relocate.

The commissioners - chairman Bernard Teague, Susan Pascoe and Ron McLeod - also recommended the Victorian Government identify "neighbourhood safer places" where people could seek refuge during fires.

Victorian Premier John Brumby foreshadowed that recommendation last month when he announced work would start to identify "safer places".

Brumby said some of the fire plans in place worked well on Black Saturday but some failed.

He said a fire that was controlled on Black Saturday at Ferntree Gully stopped much of the Dandenong Ranges, near Melbourne, from being destroyed.

"The area that I would highlight [about what did not work] would be the issue of communications systems in particular and the level of information that was provided to the community."

He believed the CFA had the resources it needed with government baseline funding for fire protection now running at $110 million annually, up from $25 million last year.

- AAP