THE Weekly Times sub editor JIM USHER tells of his agonising experience.

The waiting is agony.

The smoke rises over the hill a few hundred metres from my home in St Andrews.

Surely the flames will quickly follow. We wait for hours, the hot fierce wind piercing our protective clothing.

The pump is ready to run on the dam, enough water to give us some chance of saving our home.

I turned it on a couple of times, certain the fire was just over the hill and approaching at 80km/h.

It was the adrenalin that kept us going as we checked and rechecked our hoses, monitored the water pressure, made certain the cow was out of harm's way. The kangaroos had long deserted our paddocks; they knew what was coming.

We listened to the radio all day, checked the progress of the fire as it swirled around the Kinglake Ranges.

And then it came, less than a kilometre away.

A burning ember fell into a neighbour's paddock and he quickly doused the flame.

Only the fire engines, six of them, stood in its path, helped by the helicopter that scooped water from a nearby dam. And then the wind changed. From the north it quickly turned south.

The fire was stopped in its tracks.

The next day was worse. Reality hit. What had happened to our friends?

A couple and their small daughter dead at Strathewen.

Another daughter in hospital with 50 degree burns.

Another couple also dead, at Strathewen.

Our friends in Ninks Rd.

Twenty of 24 homes in the dead-end road lost. Rae, a friend for 30 years, dead when she tried to save the goats that had been part of her life forever.

Colin and Sonia and their little son Sam.

They tried to survive in their mud-brick home with two other families.

But when the windows came crashing down they fled into the Diamond Creek just a few metres away.

There they lay in a small water hole, a wet blanket over their heads as the flames roared overhead.

They waited until the fire eased and somehow made their way to another house. Twenty people safely stayed that night.

Other friends, Max and his son Josh, stayed to fight the fire at their home.

But it was too much and they ran through flames to their dam. There they sat and watched their home burn down.

But it was my old friend Reg Evans that I worried about. No one knew what had happened to him.

We learned on Monday morning. At the age of 81 he died fleeing the fire that engulfed his home.