IT WAS mid-morning on January 16, 2014 when Laharum's Ray Zippel knew he would be battling the Northern Grampians Complex fire.
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Mr Zippel's property on Winfields Road at the foothills of the Grampians, plus ones he manages at Wartook and Brimpaen, were among the many engulfed later that day and the following morning.
I'd seen fires start where this one started and had a pretty clear idea of what was going to happen, but just didn't know the extent of it at that stage because the weather was terrible, Mr Zippel said.
At that stage, though, I thought we still had a chance to slow it down.
We were the first to get burnt, about 6.30pm that night. I had pretty good fire breaks and we stopped it at the front fence and thought that was all that was going to happen.
But we had two other fire fronts. The last one in the middle of the night we least expected and it was the worst.
Mr Zippel had gone to bed about 11pm that night, thinking things were safe.
We'd had our fire, I thought. I was dog tired and could hardly hold my head up, he said.
We had someone watching out for sparks, and I'd hardly got to sleep and they called out that the fire was coming back on us. The house was full of smoke.
When I walked out on the front veranda, there was a fire tornado that had come down. It was as high in the sky as you could see.
It came down through the olive plantation, and as it went it was tearing out whole trees. That was all coming towards us I'd never seen anything like it before.
We found out afterwards the smoke cloud was 14 or 15km high, and it collapsed on itself in the middle of the night.
It stopped just short of our boundary fence.
From then on there was quite a strong east wind, and it just rained fire. It was like raindrops, but burning leaves dropping on us until about 4.30am. I thought, it doesn't matter how well prepared you are, you are just up against it in a situation like that.
There were three or four hectares of the olive plantation we looked at some time later, and every tree in that area had been pulled out. It was just bare sand it had taken the dirt as well.
We thought we'd lose everything. I've never experienced anything like that before.
Out of 2400 acres, we had 1500 acres burnt which included all of the house block where I live and all of the farm at Wartook and 100 acres at Brimpaen.
Mr Zippel said despite losing land and stock, he considered himself fairly lucky.
We got out of it pretty well actually, considering, he said.
It was a fire that should never have been as bad as it was.
What happened was exactly what I thought would happen. We've had a fire or two on that range and it's fairly predictable when you know the area.
Mr Zippel said the emotional toll from the fire was huge.
We were so busy at the time, that it wasn't until probably two or three months (later) before it hit me, he said.
It's hard to believe that 24 hours can make such a difference in your life.
I think I wouldn't have had an hour's sleep in about three days and were completely exhausted at the end of it. It took a very big toll on everybody.
Even to this day, I still get a bit funny about it when I see a fire on the TV.
I can't explain it. It's such a short period of time that you wouldn't think would have such a big impact, but it did.
Mr Zippel said the first 12 months of recovery in particular were horrible.
Every time the wind blew, you got black soot and dust you were just black and dirty the whole time, he said.
We had two seasons after (the fire) that were unseasonably dry things didn't recover as quickly as I thought they would.
For the first two years, there were plenty of reminders. Then we had a wet summer and it recovered quickly after that.
Every year we've been cleaning up a bit more, and there's not much trace of it left now at home.