ARCHITECT INPUTS POST THE SAMPSON FLAT BUSHFIRE

At the beginning of January 2015, fire ravaged the Sampson Flat area just outside Adelaide’s north-east suburbs. An area of 12,500ha involving the communities of Hermitage, Inglewood, Cudlee Creek, Gumeracha, Kersbrook, Humbug Scrub, One Tree Hill were impacted. 27 homes and numerous outbuildings were destroyed.

Thankfully no one died, but animals have been destroyed, injured and even now are coming out of inaccessible parts of the area in dire condition. (see www.savem.org.au)

The ‘recovery’ phase for those communities now begins, headed by State government appointed Coordinator Karlene Maywald based at the Gumeracha Recovery Centre. Through involvement during the ‘response’ phase, as SAVEM Logistics Manager, architect Emilis Prelgauskas is an invited part of the recovery process.

There will be on-going tasks to the fire affected communities for architects in the coming months (and possibly years) in advising impacted families on their re-building options and the processes involved. This begins now with pro bono involvement at Community Workshops and at the Recovery Centre.

A note of warning: the impacted communities and individuals have had a flood of outside help offered, and beyond the immediate trauma to themselves, these impacted people are also feeling stress from the implied ‘I want to help you NOW’ syndrome.

Individual intrusions from outside therefore only add to the stress. Thus it is important that only structured recovery actions occur – the Recovery Centre makes sure that assistance options are announced so that families can access these when they are ready to.

Architects who wish to contribute should therefore contact Emilis on 0415 631 713 or emilis@emilis.sa.on.net to talk through how ‘recovery’ * works. Emilis is already known within the communities as he has been hands on in the the field with formal animal retrieval over the last month.

* Bushfire arrangements are strictly structured: the State Emergency Management Plan sets the protocols, and every agency particpating is accredited. The process moves through ‘prevention’ and ‘preparedness’ phases before the event, ‘response’ during, and ‘recovery’ after the fire containment. ‘Containment’ does not mean the fire is out – even after rain and dousing by rapid response units for weeks afterward, parts of the Sampson Flat fire area still has re-igniting hot spots. The goal of the ‘recovery’ phase is to re-establish community resilience to be better than before the fire. This is a long run task.