"You think it's always going to be someone else, but you're someone else to someone else."
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This is how Paul Beltz sums up losing his family home in a fire on Monday night. The blaze also claimed the life of one of his family's three cats, Eddie.
In the days since, he, wife Prue, sons Nathaniel and Dom and daughter Catherine have been overwhelmed by the support they have been shown by Horsham.
Mr Beltz said their ordeal began when he noticed his computer switched off.
"We had what we suspect was an electrical fault," he said. "So I went out to check the fuses and a few were switched off and I noticed a smoky smell, very acrid.
"We saw that one of our downlights was glowing and then burning fairly quickly, at which point we went 'everybody get out!'.
"When we got out we could see our evaporative air conditioner above the roof was also on fire.
Mrs Beltz said: "Within five minutes it was unsafe to get back in, even before the fire brigades got there. I ducked around to the back and you could see the fire on the floor.
"I was trying to ring triple 0. Then a few neighbours came around and one of them turned off the gas which was really helpful. One tried to rescue one of our cats we could hear meowing, but we just couldn't find him."
Mrs Beltz said only Catherine wasn't home at the time the fire started. Aside from the four of themselves, the family got out their two pet dogs and two other pet cats.
"Catherine came home and found it all," Mr Beltz said.
"By that stage, the fire trucks had arrived, they managed to salvage my handbag and the car keys and Paul's phone," Mrs Beltz said.
"I ended up sitting on one of the neighbour's verandahs having a cup of coffee, and we were talking about having a fire plan and knowing what you're going to take. Really that's for if you're evacuating, because if your house starts burning around you, you don't have time to grab anything.
"All the neighbors are looking into their insurance and checking all that out now."
"On Wednesday we went there and they managed to get out a vase right at the corner of our bedroom, which was a wedding present from Paul's brother. We managed to get out the kid's birth certificates, which is great because they think the study is not too badly affected, and they managed to get out Paul's father's PhD thesis on population dynamics that his mother hand-tied."
Aside from these items, the family has lost everything, and is now living at Prue's mother's house.
"The second day was much better," Mrs Beltz said. "The day after I was almost manic I think. I couldn't sleep at all Monday night, the brain just didn't slow down, whereas I slept on Tuesday night."
For all the family has lost they have also gained something in recent days: Support from the community.
"We had to disconnect the power and the gas," Mrs Beltz said. "We were dealing with insurance a lot on Tuesday, went to get SIM cards for the boys because their phones were lost in the house, VicRoads to get identification, NDIS because Nathaniel needs a CPaP machine and Des Lardner delivered one here for us to borrow on Monday night."
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Mrs Beltz said she had reduced the house's insurance premiums only a month ago, but they were still covered.
"We had no shoes and no clothes. My sister's carer dropped off some clothes which was great, some people have donated some stuff which has been great," Mrs Beltz said.
"We had to get toiletries, dog food, cat food, talk to the council, just things you don't even think about. Deb Delahunty gave us some tablets for our dog who is on special medication.
"We had (real estate agent) Tim Coller ring my work yesterday, and he may have something, a friend of Paul's came into my work and told us of a house next to his that's furnished. We will eventually rent until we can rebuild."
Mr Beltz also thanked Horsham Rural City Council staff for promptly starting the process for an emergency demolition of the structure, and for waiving rates and charges.
Mr Beltz is a Senior Veterinary Officer at Agriculture Victoria's Grains Innovation Park campus, and Mrs Beltz works at a retail store in Horsham.
He had worked almost every day in September responding to an Avian Influenza outbreak at egg farms in the Golden Plains Shire east of the Grampians, only arriving from a seven-day deployment on Sunday.
Mrs Beltz said it had been a taxing time for the family in general in the lead up to the fire: They had been renovating their bathroom and Catherine had been adjusting to losing work and time with her friends due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mrs Beltz said this prolonged stress made the support people had shown all the more meaningful.
"I keep bursting into tears because people have just been so amazing," she said.
Mr Beltz said: "I know a lot of emergency services guys through work, and they've all been checking on me. Police, the council, the ambulance, three different groups of the CFA, and everybody wanted to help.
"People have been asking what they can do, and right now it's not much. We are just in a holding pattern until we find out where we're moving to."
With the benefit of hindsight, Mr Beltz would have done one thing differently.
"We would have had a lockbox that we could just grab," he said. "One that had a backup hard drive, photos ID, all that sort of stuff in it, that thing you can just grab and go 'I've got some of my life here'.
"We got out ourselves without any injuries, and we got four out of five pets out, and we have somewhere to stay, we're lucky in a lot of ways."
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