The 30-plus degree days over Christmas and new year did more than just drive Dubbo residents into the cooling comforts of swimming pools and air-conditioned rooms.

They worsened conditions already primed for the devastation of bushfires.

After the bitter lessons learnt on Black Saturday in 2009, residents in rural areas and regional towns are no longer complacent about the risks.

Properties have been lost but lives have been saved time and again, chiefly through sensible and early evacuation, the co-ordination of our emergency services and paid and volunteer brigades.

Grassfires can be just as dangerous as bushfires and yet regulations requiring owners of land tracts to keep vegetation mowed are not always enforced.

New housing estates, crammed with houses side by side, sit alongside paddocks choked by long grass.

Developers should be required to keep surrounding hectares they own under control.

Councils, developers and local community associations should all make the effort to educate new residents about the dangers posed by fire every summer.

Those living on the boundaries of Dubbo should be as well drilled as those who live in the region’s smallest villages.

They all need evacuation and fire management plans and should be encouraged to communicate with their neighbours to ensure everyone is able to stay safe – either leaving or sheltering – when fire threatens.

But beyond this, it is clear many residents need to learn to get out of the way of firefighters.

Scenes from the past, with curious onlookers in shorts and thongs gawking at encroaching grassfires and water-bombing helicopters, should not be repeated.

Those who stay or even drive up to watch not only put themselves at serious risk but also impede the efforts of emergency services to save lives and properties.

In recent years we’ve seen development tracts with densely populated streets spring up on the city’s edges long before the services the residents need are provided: schools, medical centres, even basic shops.

Beyond the urgent need to educate residents to take responsibility for their own fire safety, all developments must be planned, built and drilled with fire safety in mind.