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CANBERRA - Tales of death, grief and miraculous survival are emerging as Victoria begins the vast and tragic job of assessing the scale of the bushfires that continue to ravage the state.
Homes remain at risk, and in the areas razed by the worst fires in Australian history forensic teams are working through the devastation in a grim hunt for more victims.
Survivors are now telling their stories, and those of friends and relatives who could not flee in time.
Ross Buchanan, who lives in the ravaged Kinglake area where at least 35 died, lost his two children, Neeve, 9, and Mackenzie, 15.
He dropped the children at his in-laws' house, at that stage not under threat, and drove off to successfully defend his property.
But he returned to find his in-laws' house burned to the ground, his children, a brother-in-law Danny Clark, 37, and two neighbouring sisters inside.
"My mother-in-law [Jenny Clark] is in intensive care with burns to her body from trying to get back into the house," Buchanan told ABC radio.
The Chambers sisters, Penelope, 21, and Melanie, 22, died trying to save their horses.
The Australian reported that the inseparable pair had ignored the desperate pleas of friends to escape, saying they wanted to rescue the terrified animals. As they saw their mother's house erupt into flames they raced to Jenny Clark's house. All inside died.
Kinglake train driver Arthur Enver, 57, could not outrace the flames.
His partner, Petra, put their dogs in the car and fled for safety.
Enver followed on his motorcycle.
But the Herald Sun reported that the Harley-Davidson was no match for the roaring wind, choking smoke and trees that crashed across the road.
"He couldn't make it," his mother, Nadia, said. "Now I have nothing."
Elsewhere in the Gippsland region, where at least 21 have died, an elderly couple was yesterday found safe inside their Churchill house, southeast of Melbourne. They had been there since fires raced through and miraculously spared their home on Saturday.
"If that's not good news I don't know what is," Churchill fire incident controller Steve Walls said.
Daryl Hogan sent his family away from their hilltop home when he saw smoke in the distance and stayed to hose down the house. When winds whipped the fire across a field and brought flames within 30m of the house, Hogan dove into his swimming pool.
However, soon he was watching the flames leap over his house, bypassing the building and destroying the home of his closest neighbour about 400m down the road. "It just went all silent after it passed through. An eerie silence. It was quite scary."
He stayed up all night putting out spot fires as the wind changed. "It worked out in the end. But I don't know if I'd stay again."
His friend Nick Andreula nodded. Andreula's house on nearby Mt Disappointment burned to the ground. He had fled hours earlier with his wife and two children.
"We will rebuild," Andreula said. "We love it up here."
SALVATION UP A DRAINPIPE
Mark Strubing sheltered in a drainage pipe as his property, outside Kinglake, burned.
"We jumped in the car and we were only literally just able to outrun this fire. It was travelling as fast as the wind," Strubing told Nine Network television news. He did not identify a companion who hid with him.
"We managed to get down to the bottom of my property, which is flanked by the national park, and all we could do is actually crawl underneath - [into] a pipe - underneath the roadway where a creek was going through.
"I've looked at this pipe before, you'd never ever crawl under there. It's full of spiders and all sorts of uglies."
He said they rolled around in the water at the bottom to wet their clothing as flames started licking into the pipe.
"It was a terrible dark place to go, but it felt pretty good because I'd be dead right now if I didn't."
- AP
