Well, I built my house using concrete, bricks, timber (my woodwork teacher always criticised us if we said we used wood in carpentry, called "Sloyd" in those days) and steel.

At 1000m ASL and 3 hours' drive from the nearest coast I think I'm safe from tsunami, but they didn't really cross my mind when planning. I'mm well out of the cyclone belt until global warming really kicks in and I did give that some thought, which is why it is a passive-solar house. At about 50m above the general terrain, which slopes to the north I don't have to worry about flooding and the local creek flows at about three teaspoons/month at the moment so I don't regard flooding as a problem.

Earthquakes haven't been recorded around here for a few megamillenia but it is a post and beam with compressed earth walls infilling, all on a suspended (concrete) slab and brick dwarf walls. The steel is the roof; steel frames play the devil with radio and other electromagnetic media. The various components were selected by using criteria such as, they best met the various requirements of such a house, they were available in terms of accessibility and affordability and, overall, minimised my footprint as much as I could within those constraints. Especially with me doing most of the work.

And I must confess, I have found working with timber to be more pleasing, to all the senses, than working at fabrications using metals, concrete, rock or bricks.

But bushfires do exercise my mind. Like Peace, I am well aware of what happens in fires both inside and outside buildings, having been an instructor and assessor in the Rural Fire Service. Fortunately, my ecological training allows me some ability to aesthetically manage the fuel hazards while still giving the impression (to most) that the bush is wild and not "managed".

But I too wonder about the South Carolinians who rejected legislation (on the grounds of their fifth amendment) that would have required houses that had been destroyed by Hurricane Hugo to be rebuilt using building codes (borrowed, I think, from the Cyclone Tracey aftermath) that would have improved their survivability, and about the urban-rural interface dwellers around Sydney and Melbourne who rebuilt their burned out homes in exactly the same places using exactly the same fire-prone rechniques that the burned out houses had.

A speaker at the 2003 Wildland Fire Conference described the Californian fires and all us Aussies wondered about the differences and similarities. It seemed the Californians lived in a local govt context where the house owners could build whatever they liked adjacent to public land and sue the public land managers if so much as a spark came over the fence. In our view, this took all the onus and responsibility off the private citizen and put it all onto the public authority and fitted with our, perhaps biassed, views on American society. But the Oz situation is really no better. Whereas local govt does have planning powers over developments, it usually chooses not to exercise them, a situation exacerbated when estate agents constitute the majority of councillors.

Enough rambling from me.

Cheers, Rowan