"Catastrophic" and "like hell," were terms Dunalley locals used at the time to describe the inferno that engulfed the town in the middle of summer in 2013.
Elizabeth Knox remembers the positive side.
"We had collected at the pub, and some people started making lists of who was around, registering people. Others were organising food, getting boats in," she recalls.
"The community was reasonably isolated and had to deal with its own immediate issues themselves... and out of the woodwork came people who just knew what to do."
With a population of less than 400, the losses that accumulated that day and the days that followed were devastating for the entire community.
No lives were lost, but an estimated 65 homes were destroyed. Businesses burned, and the town also lost its school, which Knox says was the "heart of the community".
Dunalley Primary School takes in 130 students who come from near and far to attend.
Without it, locals feared there would be no regular traffic to sustain local businesses. There were also concerns the closure of the school would prompt those who had lost their homes to rebuild elsewhere, closer to services.
"The second morning of the fires at 7 o'clock in the morning one of the parents turned up at my house," says Knox.
"He'd been fighting fires for two days, his face was black and he just had these red eyes poking out, and he said 'Elizabeth, what are we going to do about the school?'"
Meg Bignell, whose six-year-old twins were students at the school, says it was a "devastating" blow.
"When I found out the school had been burnt down, my first thought was, the town won't recover," she recalls.
As President of the Dunalley School Association, Elizabeth Knox helped rally residents. Together, they lobbied the Department of Education for funding and just 40 days later, a temporary school was rebuilt just metres from where the old one once stood.
"In hindsight I can't believe that that's what happened, that the school was built in 40 days," says Knox.
"For us to propose that to the Department and the Minister seemed very logical at the time.
"It's just what had to happen. In hindsight, it was a ridiculous ask but they met our needs."
Damian Bugg, Chair of the Bushfire Recovery Taskforce, says it takes input from a whole range of sectors to rebuild after a disaster.
"It's a very intricate mix of responsibilities. Private responsibilities, corporate responsibilities, government responsibilities," he says.
"[Dunalley] will never come back to exactly as it was, but what we wanted to try and do was not only get it back, but get it back better, and that was certainly the wish of the community who we encouraged to lead the recovery, and they did that admirably."
Not everyone in town considers themselves lucky. A sawmill employing around a dozen people is not expected to reopen
Across the town, there are signs that some have rebuilt. Other sites lay abandoned.
Today, Dunalley Primary School is a modest cluster of buildings built on a parcel of land that used to be a playing field.
With landscaped gardens, bright playing equipment and half-a-dozen classrooms housed in prefabricated blocks, it still bears the scars of last year's devastation.
A ridge of burned bush can be clearly seen in the distance, and behind a basketball court a flight of stairs wends its way to a cordoned-off patch of grass where the old school once stood, empty but for memories.
"The children don't really go up there," says Knox.
Plans for a permanent school are now in place. Building is expected to commence in July or August with a completion date of 2015.
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