people live in rural areas for all sorts of reasons.
farmers live there because thats where the farms are
lower income familys live there because properties are more afordable
towns are there to service the local populations.
the 'make em live in the city' is not feasable.
i lived in a rural area for over 30 years because my youngest sister wanted to do the 'horse' thing, you cant keep horses in a suburban back yard.
over those 30 years we faced 3 bushfires, none that actually reached our home. but the last one did get to about 5 meters from our house.
after the 2nd fire we installed a sprinkler system, two 5,000 gallon rain water tanks fed by a bore through a 5hp fire fighting pump to sprinklers all over the house. this system could drench the house in about 5 minutes and keep it that way for up to 45 minutes. we also installed a generator that could power the entire house plus the bore in case the power was cut during a fire. total cost about $7,000
most fires are very fast moving, arrived and passed in about 10 minutes in my experience.
that last fire proved the point, days after the fire you could see the fire had surged towards our home then split around the house and gone on its way leaving us pretty much untouched.
i would like to see more country people investing in home fire prevention.
