It's been 10 years since Victoria's deadly Black Saturday bushfires, which cost 173 lives and prompted a major shift in Australia's approach to firefighting. Some of those affected are reflecting on the nation's most costly fires.
Christine Adams owned a motel which was completely destroyed in the Victorian town of Marysville on February 7th, 2009, in the Black Saturday bushfires. She and her husband consider themselves among the lucky ones, managing to evacuate their guests just before the fire hit.
Marysville was one of the hardest-hit towns, losing 45 people - nearly a tenth of its population. Ms Adams and her husband chose to return to Marysville where they now run the local caravan park.
She describes the moment she and her husband knew it was time to leave the town: "So it was a normal day for us other than we were aware it was hot and windy. We had a little motel, and we were checking in a few guests into the motel and we wandered upstairs, closed the blinds - it was hot. That's what you do. Turn on the air conditioning and chill out. Got a phone call late in the afternoon from a friend asking whether we had seen the smoke. We went outside had a look and that was the moment of (reaslisation): 'we are in trouble here.' It was like nothing I had ever seen before."
The consequent Royal Commission found there were about 400 fires burning on February the 7th. It heard the five major fires claimed 173 lives. Commissioner Bernard Teague said this figure far exceeded the loss of life from any previous bushfires, including Ash Wednesday, in February 1983, when 75 people died in Victoria and South Australia.
The RSPCA said more than one million animals died in the fire while VicForests reported the fires burnt about 10,000 hectares of commercial mountain ash forest.
Dr Lachlan Fraser escaped the fire in Marysville, but lost his home and his clinic. "Within minutes one neighbour's house was razed to the ground. The back neighbour's house went, the neighbour on the side it went and then the neighbour's house was a big fireball came into my place. I came back and slipped on the water, smashed a window with my hand, I had a wound and blood everywhere. I took the dogs and said to them we are going to survive this. I tied them to my car which was up on the street, with the hazard lights going. We fled down to the oval. I had no thoughts of getting anything out of the house; it was a matter of survival then."
The fires were fanned by 100 kilometre an hour winds in 40-plus degree heat. More than 2,000 properties were destroyed and 7,500 people were displaced.
The fires responsible for most of the deaths were linked to fallen power lines or arson.
The Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission found more than 9,000 calls for help were made to Triple-0 on Black Saturday.
Helen Kenny was in charge at the St Andrews Country Fire Association station and helped shelter a number of people at the station. She became concerned when people stopped arriving: "We set up a triage with a few local nurses so that we were able to treat anyone that came in. We were fortunate in some ways that we only had three or four people come through that required treatment but then there was no more and that really raised alarm bells - where are they? But sitting at the station without vehicles we were not in a position to do much about that."
The Royal Commission made 67 recommendations including early warning systems and a more detailed approach to shelter options and evacuations.
We spoke to Antonella Cavallo, Associate Professor at the Torrens Institute at Flinders University (SA) about the history and today's issues when dealing with catastrophic events in Australia.
