What It’s Like When a Wildfire Sweeps Through Your Home

Twice, Max Atkins went back into his burning home to retrieve treasured belongings before the 84-year-old conceded defeat. He staggered out through the thick smoke as flames licked the doorway of “Currowar,” his heritage-listed farmhouse, dating back to 1869. #AustraliaWildfires

Singed by the burning grass, he looked back at the property on Australia’s southeastern coast where he’d lived for more than 35 years.

“It was just a ball of flame,” said the retired high-school teacher and cattle breeder in an interview. The inferno “engulfed the house completely, and was probably about 20 or 30 feet in the air all around,” he said.

Atkins’ four-bedroom house in Yatte Yattah, a rural enclave a few miles inland from the beach, was one of about 4,000 that have been damaged or destroyed by the country’s worst bushfires since 2009. He was lucky to get out alive. Some of the at least 31 people killed by the recent fires were residents trying to protect their homes.

Atkins had known the fires were headed toward his property, but like many others, he was unprepared for the speed with which the wall of fire hit him. The time between the first embers landing on his roof and Atkins’ arrival—scorched and shaken—at a local hospital in the back of a firetruck, was less than an hour.

The former local mayor had been tracking the bushfires for weeks and had taken steps to be able to fight off the fires if they reached his community. Other people had successfully defended their homes.

Only a day before, in neighboring Victoria state, Daniel Cash, a Melbourne-based barrister, had spent more than 12 hours helping protect his father-in-law Mark McCord’s house as fires swept through the forested community of Clifton Creek.

“We were putting out fires at our feet all day and all night with hoses and buckets of water,” said Cash. More than a dozen properties in the village were razed, along with parts of the primary school. “Structures had become piles of rubble with twisted corrugated iron on top of them.” The scene, he said, was “apocalyptic.”

When the fires finally arrived at Atkins’ home on the morning of New Year’s Eve, he was alone. His wife Val, 82, and one of the couple’s three adult children were prevented from returning from a nearby town by a road block.

To the northwest of his property, Atkins watched a hillside turn into a dense wall of fire and felt a fierce wind that whipped a blizzard of red glowing embers toward his home.

“They just started dropping and dropping,” Atkins said. “They were on top of the house, in the yard and around the outbuildings—just hundreds and hundreds of them.”

Atkins had attached five hoses around his home to outdoor watering taps and doused flames that sprang up in the rose beds and pine fence around the house. “It didn’t take long to discover that even though you have five hoses, you can only use one at a time,” Atkins said.

He had no time even to call the emergency services. As the flames crept from the scorched lawn to the timber panels of the house, he doused one burning patch after another.

“I thought I was winning,” he said. “I put out these areas and thought I’d got to the stage where I’d actually, for the moment, got them all out.”

That was until he realized that the flames had got inside.

He went into the house to try to extinguish the flames in the living room. “The heat inside it was phenomenal, and the smoke was white and black,” Atkins said. He rushed to an adjacent laundry room for a bucket of water, only to find that the supply to the taps had been lost.

“There was the realization that I had no water, and that would mean I can’t get this fire out. Immediately then, the thought is completely different: The house was gone, what can I save?”

He grabbed whatever was to hand, running out with a hamper of freshly washed clothes. The wind picked up garments from the basket and blew them away. Atkins dived back into the house and grabbed framed photographs from the cedar mantelpiece, including images of the couple’s 1958 wedding and their anniversary 60 years later. From a bedroom he took other photos and some loose cash.

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