 Saturday is looming as one of the worst days for bushfires in the world. We've looked at the records and the forecast for Ash Wednesday, even the amended forecast on Ash Wednesday, is not as bad as what's being forecast for Saturday. As an old bush bloke you can smell the heat and you could certainly smell the heat that day. By 10 o'clock there was a strong smell of eucalyptus in the air which means that the leaves are opening up because it's hot. It was windy and it was hot and you could see a heat haze right across the district. So you knew it was going to be a real bad day and once something started it took off and it ran and it really moved very, very quickly. You woke up early that morning and I walked out the door at 6 o'clock. And at the moment you walked out the door I thought, holy hell, something will happen today because it was so extremely hot at 6 o'clock in the morning and the wind was a really hot, strong wind already. And everyone was on tenterhooks that there would be a fire of some sort. So everyone was just sort of waiting, hoping that nothing would happen. And the morning went by and it was fine but of course by afternoon all hell broke loose. Large clumps of black material that had already been burnt was falling all over the place. And it was quite frightening because you were looking around everywhere trying to think now where's the fire going to start here? When the fire was coming towards us the ember attack was like it was hailing, it was hailing embers on that day. The roar of the wind was incredible, it was like you're standing behind a plane and you could barely talk to each other. And then the last thing that happened was a big mob of kangaroos come through and nearly took a few of us out while they were trying to escape. For a period of maybe 5 to 10 minutes there was two of my firefighters that were unaccounted for. We didn't know their location, you can't help but think what worst case scenario is there. It's just absolutely gut-churning and that was something that will always stick with me as probably the worst part of that day. That helplessness, that's not what we're used to. We're used to on a day-to-day basis attending emergencies and events and bringing those to a conclusion. We couldn't do that so it was abnormal for us. We're making decisions where we couldn't really use our skills and our equipment and help people that we sort of had to move on to something that we could achieve. So it was a real conflict really of what we're used to doing and making some tough decisions at the time. That feeling, coming back to that feeling of helplessness. Like fire intensity is measured in kilowatts per linear meter. Ash Wednesday there was 108,000. The predictions on that Friday night for the Saturday was 130,000. So that told me that if a fire started it couldn't be stopped. I got a phone call from the regional duty officer saying that they don't have the capacity at the IMT to manage this fire. The group is going to have to manage it and we'll see what happens. So that left me sitting there as the incident controller for the Bendigo fire, which was a new concept. One stage there I took a breath and walked outside. And that was the only way you could work out the air conditioning was working as if you went outside and realised how hot it was. To my right I could see the Reedsdale Plume, a very big plume and to my left was the Eagle Hawk Plume. And then that's when I knew the fact that we were in real trouble. It was coming straight at us the Eagle Hawk fire. The gardens around my house were burning and the pergola was on fire but the actual front had gone. I've got a sprinkler system around the back of the house which spread the fire and just pushed it around the house so we're lucky that we never lost the house. I got a call from the wife saying that she needed a fire tanker quickly and I didn't have any to spare and I had to tell her no. Lost shedding and farmland, only one animal and a lot of hay and whatever but nobody was injured and that was my biggest concern of the whole fire that we might get somebody into trouble but we were lucky enough that everybody was safe. As soon as the pulmonic captain said that it had jumped the highway I knew we were in trouble and it was just a matter of focusing on getting structures in place and getting tankers into safe positions. I tried with my driver and pencilate to get towards the head of the fire and as I went down Carter's Road the fire met me and I knew the area and there were a couple of tankers were heading down the road and I called them back to where I was into a paddock with no grass in it and the fire burnt under us and I'm quite sure if I had to let those tankers go down Carter's Road we would have had big trouble so that's the one thing I do remember getting those tankers on a safe ground. When the fire crossed the highway it burned through my brother Terry's farm and my parents. My father got stopped at a road block and wasn't able to get home and my mother and my mother and granddaughter took shelter in the dairy and the fire burned around them but Dad always said that was the worst day in his life. I forgot about that. We were getting information about how the day was evolving and I started to get a bit nervous about just what was ahead of us ahead of me personally for the day but ahead of us. It wasn't long after that the deployment came and I suppose we were in fire mode. I was starting to think about what the day was going to bring I was thinking about my own house and how we were situated as far as safety I was thinking about my family, we live on a rural property. I think I went home and checked all of that and that was about the time that we had before we were deployed and I was off. We wouldn't have driven that far south and then the fire actually jumped the highway in front of us and that was the other environmental thing, I had never seen fire that big like 12, 15 metre high flames and it jumped the highway as though it wasn't even there like we look at the highway as a significant fire break well it was nothing, it was a blip, it was just nothing. As the fire hit trees they just exploded and that was all in front of us and that was probably just the real moment that I realised where we were going and the situation that we were in. We could sort of smoke rise and come in towards us and it was pretty tense, like we sat round, in all honesty we weren't talking we were just sitting there waiting for it all to happen and it was a really tense moment because we didn't know how fast it was going to hit us we knew our escape route, we knew how to get out, where we could get out when we needed to, if we needed to we just simply didn't know what it was going to be like when it hit us. I think the day was one, as I've used before, it was annuity I think it was a wake-up call for a lot of people, a lot of members in the community about how we can be impacted and how fires affect us I think it was a wake-up call to ensure that we better prepare for emergencies Unfortunately, I think these sort of events are going to re-occur again and unfortunately more often.