Watching the video, remember that he says he has a clear view for at least 10kms (about 7 miles). At the start, the first flames are just visible in the far distance; at the end, just four minutes later, part of the fire-front has already passed to the left of the house. That’s a probable speed of around 100km/h, or sixty miles an hour – maybe more. No wonder the animals, and most of the drivers, were unable to outrun the flames.

This quote, from an article in Melbourne’s The Age, “Fire’s intensity leaves no trace of victims“, presents in bleak, bald fact some inkling as to what those caught in the flames would have faced:

Forensic police from around Australia who have been deployed to the devastated areas are using the most advanced DNA techniques to identify some unrecognisable remains.

Kevin Tolhurst, Melbourne University senior lecturer in fire ecology and management, said flames would have been about 1200 degrees when they roared across the state.

He said he had calculated the areas burnt and energy released from the fires equalled 400 to 500 Hiroshima atomic bombs and generated 80,000 kilowatts per metre of flame front.

Dr Tolhurst said people caught in the open would be charred and could be identified by forensic tests.

But some of those in vehicles and buildings could have been obliterated.

“In some cases, unless there was jewellery or some other identifying article, there would be nothing left but ashes,” Dr Tolhurst said.

Police working in Marysville, where almost every building was destroyed, say it will take at least another week of intense work to satisfy themselves they have not missed any remains among the ashes.

“The trouble is human ash looks pretty much the same as the ash of everything else,” a forensic policeman told The Age. “And there are tonnes and tonnes of ash.”

I suspect there may be a slight editorial error there: 80,000 watts per metre seems more likely than 80,000 kilowatts. Australia also uses metric units, so “1200 degrees” would be in Centigrade, hence around two thousand degrees Fahrenheit – but whichever we look at it, that’s seriously hot. So in many ways what’s most startling is how many did survive under those conditions. “I love an unburnt country”: scary indeed…

Most of the attention, correctly, has been on the beautiful forested areas north and east of Melbourne – towns I knew well, like Marysville, St Andrews, Kinglake, where so many have died. Closer to my old home, there have been lethal fires at Bendigo and Redesdale; closer still, several houses destroyed at Drummond, barely a mile or two away, though thankfully without loss of life. But it’s been bizarrely random: other friends at Castlemaine, barely ten miles from Drummond and Redesdale, have said they haven’t even smelt a whiff of smoke. Odd.

And a colleague of a close friend at Australia Post was also one of the probably-lucky ones in the worst-hit zone: she and her family all survived relatively unscathed, but everything else is gone. She sings the praises of her Subaru Forester – the same car I still have back over there – because it somehow kept going till they arrived at the fire station, and safety, before it finally melted…

Fire is a basic fact of life in the Australian bush: the whole ecology is centred round fire, it’s why kangaroos can run so fast, and wombats and koalas can dig a burrow in one heck of a hurry. I’ve seen fires often enough in the hot dry summer, thick smoke on the horizon, or roaring in the trees in the distance – even a gorse-fire, accidentally set off by one of the local fire-crew, which roared up the hill to within a few yards of my fence-line. But it’s clear that this was something much, much worse: flames well over a hundred feet high, temperatures that had no trouble melting alloy car-wheels, fire-fronts that in some places leapt through the landscape faster than a mile a minute, pressure-fronts so severe that they could cause a house to literally explode. Lethal: no wonder people died.

“I love a sunburnt country”, runs a much-loved poem, amended some years back to the somewhat sardonic “I love an unburnt country”. Long may it be so; and for those who died, may you rest in peace, as your friends and neighbours and family start the painful process of rebuilding their lives once more.

Go well.