Further west and north there were significant outbreaks but these at least appear to have run their course and this week's welcome burst of almost cool should enable their cleaning up. In the east, as always, it was and remains much much worse.

In much younger days, I became familiar with the names of hamlets in the environmentally seductive belt to the northeast and east of Melbourne only in times of wild fire. Many of those same names are prominent again today. The hills are steeper and more forested over that side, an even greater magnet for tree changers and their ilk despite the threats. Most of Melbourne's electric and water supplies come through or from those areas which has again proven a recipe for dancing with even greater disaster.

Over the last few years, the southern slopes of the Victoria high country variously described as Gippsland of the Latrobe Valley has burnt and burnt again. During our first burst of record heat a couple of weeks earlier a major fire complex became established south of the Valley in ranges that almost twin the Otways on the other side of our bays. Fires already burning with no prospect of being extinguished guaranteed those areas would suffer again, though the extreme combination of wind and weather saw them move far faster and further than anyone had imagined possible.

But the real disasters were further north.

Last time there were major fires I accidentally discovered that the hot spots are easily pinpointed by seemingly anchored plumes on weather watch radar and tried to make the suggestion to a relevant authority that they might investigate this as a means for advance intelligence as it seemed I was seeing things in advance of the live crosses from the excellent local ABC radio coverage to the Country Fire Authority. Yesterday I finally conceded to the temptation to have a look at the radar and immediately saw two plumes, one totally expected from Bunyip state forest which had been burning since lightning strikes earlier in the week and the other nearly as strong from east of Kilmore which at that time had no urgent fire alerts on the CFA's well performed website.*

As the afternoon advanced and the Kilmore East fire entered regular conversation, a new plume emerged due west of Buxton which I had to go to maps to identify as being near Murrindindi, a name which did not seem to appear on any lists for well over another hour. With the curse of hindsight I can also now see that what I only saw at the time as a strange reshaping directly under the Kilmore East plume was rather an explosive spread of that rapidly advancing fire front. We now know that the Kilmore East fire wiped out the towns of Kinglake, Kinglake West and Kinglake Central with considerable loss of life and the Murrindindi Mill fire wiped out the even more iconic town of Marysville.

While the peak weather intensity yesterday smashed all records, as a wider community we are clearly better prepared, even with many more people choosing to live in high fire risk areas. While I can only rely on a generation nearly gone's first hand stories, the toll in a much less populous state on our previous hottest day, Black Friday, was huge by comparison, though brought into context in people's memories by the war that was about to break out and the depression that war finally put behind us.

Being just 26 years ago, Ash Wednesday is still vivid in the minds of many, be it the cloud of dust and ash that rolled into Melbourne, carrying the smell of favourite getaways burning, or the devastation we found with all but three of the houses between Airey's Inlet and Lorne destroyed while legitimately traveling back to our soon to be washed away camp at Cumberland River. Yesterday's loss of Horsham Golf Club brought back memories of a weekend with our cricket canceled helping friends stack up the minimal charred and flattened remains of Lorne Golf Club.

*Relying entirely of the radar without corroboration would be nearly as bad as ignoring it. I had been putting off looking for further information online until my first check of the radar showed what looked like a persistent feature between Mt Cowley and the coast, but which within half an hour proved to be transitory. But by then, with the state of the weather and having agreed to sit next door's dog through the worst of it, I was hooked on following it, eventually extending to the radio which can be unavoidably repetitive but still hard to turn off.