In the ashes of a firestorm

PORT LINCOLN - The two women stand in what was the front yard of a home.

Now, it is a crumpled pile of brick and corrugated iron. A light breeze whips up small eddies of ash.

Down the road others are gathered at the Port Lincoln Caravan Park, where 10 of the 13 vans that were home to the park's permanent residents are charred shells.

It is 48 hours since the firestorm hit North Shields, a hamlet north of Port Lincoln on the southern tip of South Australia's Eyre Peninsula.

The huge fires swept across the bottom of the peninsula on Tuesday and Wednesday, killing nine people, laying waste 80,000ha of farmland, and destroying dozens of homes and about 250,000 sheep and cattle.

North Shields is an idyllic town of 200 people on the sparkling waters of the Spencer Gulf.

The fires killed one woman and destroyed nine homes.

There was no warning of what was to come.

The fire broke out on Tuesday morning to the north-east, burning across about 1800ha of land and heading south-west until the wind began rising and temperatures soared into the high 30s.

By Tuesday afternoon, the residents of Poonindie, Louth Bay, Greenpatch, and Wanilla had been warned to be ready to leave.

Nobody realised how fast the fire would run.

It hit Wanilla about midday on Tuesday.

The people in North Shields, 30km distant, believed that if the worst came they would have several hours to prepare. They didn't.

The fire raced across farmland at more than 80km/h, covering the distance between the two towns in 20 minutes.

"You'd never expect a fire to cover the ground as quick as it did," said North Shields local and volunteer firefighter Wayne Coventry.

Added van park worker Valda Horne: "If people say we should have been more organised, they can go and get stuffed. You cannot imagine the speed it was travelling at."

In the hills above the town one couple were preparing their firefighting equipment when the blaze burst across the crest.

They ran inside their house, unable to reach their vehicles, and tried desperately to telephone friends. Finally one answered.

He raced to the property in a four-wheel-drive vehicle and saved his friends as their house started to burn.

In the town, people had made early preparations, but thought the fire was too far away to worry about.

"Then a friend pulled into the driveway with her dog in her car and said 'Quick, quick, we've got to get to the beach'," said one resident who did not wish to be named.

"We looked out and the paddock behind us was going up. The smoke came across the road and our garden had gone up, so we just ran with buckets of rainwater and with wet towels over our heads trying to put out fires."

At the caravan park, Valda Horne was preparing to go home to her property outside town about 1pm.

"I saw the flames lapping the edge of the bitumen beside the park.

"I just walked back inside and said to the boss 'It's here, we'd better get out'. We ran and shut the place down and headed for the beach."

The smoke was so intense the people of North Shields could barely see a metre in front of their faces, and the noise was terrifying as they headed for the narrow strip of shoreline.

As the caravan park residents ran, LPG tanks exploded behind them. Fortunately the main gas tank and the petrol pumps at the front of the park escaped the flames.

Wayne Coventry was asleep at home, on a break after hours of firefighting. His wife woke him up, alarmed at the sudden pall of smoke rolling in from the hills.

"I saw red flames and the smoke, and I knew the fire was about to hit," Mr Coventry said.

"We frantically locked up and shut down as best we could and waited. It went over the top of our house.

"The heat was that intense I couldn't get out the door.

"But as soon as it cooled down I put a wet towel over my face and went out with the garden hose to keep the spot fires off my home."

Most of the people of North Shields were on the beach forming chain gangs with buckets of water from the sea and from rain tanks.

Contractors and any truck that could carry water were racing out from nearby Port Lincoln to help battle the blaze,

Schoolteacher Helen Castle ran from safety back into her house and was not seen alive again.

She was among the victims of the worst fires to hit South Australia since the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires.

"She was on the beach," Mr Coventry said.

"People saw her there as the fire was coming, but she must have decided to get something out. She went in, but didn't come out again."

Among the refugees was 85-year-old Lorna Harding, who fled the house she was born in. It was destroyed.

Beyond North Shields the countryside is ravaged.

At the nearby town of White Flats, only three of 15 homes are believed to have survived.

Kilometre after kilometre of ground has been seared of all cover, and trees are reduced to black stalks as far as the eye can see.

On some paddocks piles of dead sheep show where the animals huddled as the flames advanced.

All that remains of one farmhouse are concrete steps and iron railings leading to a pile of rubble.

* In Victoria yesterday, fire crews worked furiously to contain a blaze in the state's far west, north of the town of Balmoral, battling hot weather and gusts of north-westerly wind.

The fire has killed 6000 head of livestock, burned 8800ha of farmland and destroyed several buildings since it began on Tuesday.