Your wildfire action plan

Most wildfire advice tells you what to buy and what to clear. Very little of it tells you what to decide. Yet in the hour a fire approaches, the decisions are what actually determine the outcome: when you start wetting, who does what, and the moment you stop and go.

This page covers those decisions, and gives you a free one page card to fill in and print. It was put together by Hephaestus Fire Solutions, and it works whether or not you own any of our equipment. If you have not yet done the physical preparation, start with our wildfire season preparation checklist and come back to this.

Why a plan beats a checklist on the day.

Preparation checklists are useful in spring, when you have time and a clear head. They are close to useless in the hour a fire arrives, because nobody reads a checklist while the sky turns orange and the phone starts ringing.

What holds under pressure is what you already decided. If you agreed in March that you leave when fire reaches the next ridge, you leave. If you never agreed anything, you stand in the driveway arguing about it, and that argument costs the minutes that mattered.

Four decisions do most of the work. They take about fifteen minutes at a kitchen table, once a year.

1. Decide your trigger.

Not “if it gets close.” Close is a feeling, and feelings arrive late. Pick something you can point at: a smoke column visible from the house, an official warning for your area, a satellite alert on your phone.

When that happens, you start wetting. Not before, not after, and not while you debate whether this one counts. The value of a written trigger is that it removes the debate.

Set it earlier than feels necessary. Wetting a property takes time, water pressure often drops as a fire approaches, and mains supply can be cut. Early is cheap. Late is not.

2. Know your water and your runtime.

Work out, once, roughly how long your water source lasts at full flow. A pool, a tank, a well, or a combination. Divide the volume by the flow rate of whatever you are using to move it. The number will probably surprise you.

Then decide whether you run continuously or in cycles. Cycles almost always cover more ground: wet the key areas, pause, and repeat, so surfaces stay damp for longer across a wider area rather than one zone being soaked while the rest dries.

3. Decide who does what.

The question most households have never answered: if you are not home, who starts the pump? Fires do not wait for you to finish work. That person, a partner, a neighbour, a caretaker, needs to have started it themselves at least once. Watching does not count.

If you are home, one person on the equipment is one person not packing, not moving the car, not getting children and animals out. Say out loud now who does which, because working it out in the noise is how things get missed.

4. Know your exit before you need it.

One route out, and a second if the first is blocked. Fires close roads, and so do the people leaving on them. Know which direction you go, where you are going, and who you are telling.

Then agree the point at which you stop and go, and agree that nobody argues about it when it comes. This is the hardest part of the plan and the only part that is genuinely about survival rather than property. Write it down, because the version you agreed calmly is the one worth keeping.

Fill it in together, and put it where you will see it.

A card that lives on a phone does nothing. The answers matter more than the printed text, because they are the part that is specific to your property: your water volume, your neighbour’s name, your road.

Fill it in at the kitchen table, with whoever else lives there. The conversation while you fill it in is worth as much as the finished card.

Then check it once a year. Water levels change. A route gets blocked by building works. A child becomes old enough to help rather than only to be evacuated. One answer changes almost every year.

Why we built this.

In July 2025 a wildfire moved through Souni, the village in Limassol District where this company is based, during a heatwave that reached 43 degrees. Neighbours defended houses with pumps and pool water through the night. The first fire truck reached the area at five in the morning.

What stood out afterwards was not a lack of equipment. It was that almost nobody had decided anything in advance. People worked out where the water was, who would do what, and when to leave, in the middle of it. The households that did best were the ones who had thought about it before.

This card is that thinking, on one page, so it can be done on a quiet day instead.

Every decision above depends on time.

A plan you cannot start in time is not a plan, and equipment you cannot reach in time is not protection. Everything on the card assumes you know a fire is coming while there is still room to act.

That is why we developed Fire Monitor alongside the equipment. It watches satellite fire detections and tells you the distance, intensity and direction of a fire near a location you set. Everyone else sells the response. The warning is half the story.