Given the intense heat of the day, Alan headed outside to the shed to find an alternate power source.

He planned to return to the house with a generator. Instead, he returned terrified.

The source of the power cut was immediately obvious as Mr Peterson had stepped onto his back veranda - a fire had sparked at a power pole in a paddock bordering their house block, only a hundred or so metres away.

"I walked out the back door, and I couldn't believe how strong the wind was," Mr Peterson said.

"I walked into the wind hunched over, and it took a few minutes to get the distance.

"Out the corner of my eye I saw a flash of blue. That's when I looked and saw the flames coming up off the foot of the pole.

"I high-tailed it back to the house. Because the wind was then behind me, it only took about 20 seconds to get home.

When the power went off, Mrs Peterson initially thought calling Powercor would be of no use.

"I said to Alan, Everyone will lose power today. Then after a minute I thought, No I will ring," she said.

"I was sitting there waiting to get through to Powercor when Alan came running back inside and said, 'Hang up and call Triple Zero we've got a fire'.

"It wasn't long and the fire trucks were out here."

Mr Peterson said with the way the wind was blowing, he knew the fire would get close to Horsham.

"It was sheer terror. I was absolutely petrified that if it got to the edge of the town, people would die," he said.

"You just got to that point that you couldn't even think or speak."

Mrs Peterson said the couple's home, which they have lived in since 1968, was never in the line of fire.

"But you never knew when there might have been a wind change," she said.

"And there was later in the day, as the Haven people found out."

Mr Peterson took a generator out to a friend at Haven who had also lost power, and was subsequently unable to pump water to protect their house.

The Petersons lost an old farm house, sheds, machinery, trees and fencing, as well as a vast amount of topsoil.

They had more than 900 acres of land at the time, and about half was fire-affected.

Mr Peterson said there was about 25 acres of timber in one part of the property, and two thirds of it was burnt in the fire.

He said a battle over clearing the fire-damaged trees and the relevant permit to undertake the work took its toll after the event, and was a very difficult time for the couple.

He said the issue was not resolved until a few years later.

Mr Peterson said seeing their farm after the fire was like nothing he had ever seen before.

"It was like the back side of the moon," he said.

"Museum Victoria came up here and they collected fence posts and bits of stuff to put in their museum, and one of the things they took back was what I call sinter. It looks like a whole heap of glass that has been melted out in the dirt.

"Cynthia and I went to Japan a couple of years ago and we went to the museum in Hiroshima, and they had a piece of sinter there from after it was bombed.

"So the temperatures a bomb generated were similar to what was generated with this fire."

Mrs Peterson said the ferocity of the wind that day meant that after the fire passed, the couple could not see any black soil.

"We only saw dirt, because all the black stuff had been picked up and blown away," she said.

"We couldn't see what had happened to our property over the road until about 8pm, but we knew it would have to have been burnt.

"I just feel sad that though we didn't cause the fire it was out of our control we couldn't do anything to stop it going where it did and burning other people out."