The 72 hours after a fire front passes are among the most dangerous for anyone going back onto fire-affected land. The urgency is real — stock, infrastructure, insurance assessment, getting back to work — and it runs directly against the fact that the hazard population is still changing.
This sets out a defensible process for clearing a property or operational area for re-entry.
Step 1 — Do not clear the whole property
The instinct is to declare a site safe or unsafe. Neither is usually true or useful. Divide it into zones by what you actually need: the house, the shed and the yard; the access track; the water point; the stock paddocks; the back country nobody needs to enter for a month.
Clear the zones you need, in the order you need them. This is faster, cheaper and more honest than attempting a whole-of-property clearance.
Step 2 — Assess from outside, moving in
Hazardous trees are identified from a safe distance before anyone works beneath them. Walk the boundary of each zone and the length of each access route with your head up. What you are recording:
- Lodged and hanging limbs in the canopy
- Smoke, heat, or sound from stems — internally burning “pipes”
- Burned-out root systems, ash voids, ground that gives underfoot near a base
- Deep or continuous basal char, hollowed boles, catfaces
- New lean, lifted root plates, root-sprung trees
- Dead trees standing within reach of anything you need to use
Step 3 — Apply exclusion zones before clearing anything
Two tree lengths, minimum, from every identified hazardous tree. Where lean or terrain makes the fall direction predictable, 180 degrees in that direction.
Then look at what the zones have swallowed. If your only access track runs through one, the track is not open, whatever its surface condition. That is the finding — not an inconvenience to be worked around.
Step 4 — Mark and record
Yellow circle-and-cross, roughly 30 cm, at about 1.5 m, on two sides of the stem where it is safe. Record each tree's location, the defect and the exclusion radius. The record does two jobs: it briefs the people coming in behind you, and it evidences the decision if the property is later part of an insurance or regulatory process.
Step 5 — Brief everyone entering
Including contractors, assessors, family, and anyone helping with clean-up. They are the people most likely to walk under a marked tree, because they did not walk the site with you and they are focused on debris at their feet rather than the canopy.
Step 6 — Re-inspect, and set the trigger now
This is the step that gets dropped. Root systems continue burning underground for days. Cambium- killed trees dry and embrittle over months. Removal of the understorey exposes survivors to wind loads they never adapted to, and that risk presents at the next weather event, not this one.
Set the re-inspection interval before you leave the site, and add a standing trigger for the first significant wind or rain event afterwards.
For duty holders
If the fire-affected land is a workplace — a farm, a park, a plantation, a tourism operation — section 19 of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (Qld) applies to workers under subsection (1) and to other persons under subsection (2), and requires the provision and maintenance of a work environment without risks to health and safety. Re-entry is exactly the moment where that duty is tested, because you are directing people onto ground whose hazards you have not yet characterised.
A dated, zoned re-entry assessment with a hazard tree register is what a documented decision looks like here.