Fire victims helped to navigate planning ‘maze’

Original article ran in In Daily: Adelaide Independent News on 9 June 2015 by Bension Siebert. Blog entry can be found here http://blog.anzdmc.com.au/sampson-flat-bushfires-fire-victims-helped-to-navigate-planning-maze/

A team of architects and planners are engaging in pro bono work alongside the victims of the Sampson Flat bushfires, assisting them to rebuild homes and sheds without falling foul of local planning regulations.

Veteran architect Emilis Prelgauskas is leading the team, which seeks to minimise the antagonism that can often develop between victims of a natural disaster and planning system enforcers.

“People get very perplexed and very disoriented,” Prelgauskas told InDaily.

“Inside the approvals processes, we use words which mean something completely different from what they mean in normal, day-to-day life.”

The Murray Bridge-based architect spent the first several weeks of the fire away from his architecture practice, coordinating the retrieval of animals from the fire zone. Since then he has led the Sampson Flat rebuilding team, which advises those who have lost buildings on how to navigate planning regulations.

Explaining how planning language can confuse property owners, Prelgauskas said that when something was described as “compliant”, this actually meant it was “just barely meeting the rules”. Conversely, when something was said to be non-compliant, that didn’t necessarily mean it couldn’t be done.

More than 100 sheds and 27 homes were destroyed in the January bushfire.