Time for unity not blame: firefighter

In the past two days, the Country Fire Authority lieutenant from Dixons Creek has seen a body tumble from a smashed car and charred remains in the blackened shells of vehicles.

He tried to help a woman find her sister's children - only to discover they had burned in a house in the Kinglake fires on Saturday.

Attending a community meeting at Yarra Glen yesterday morning dressed in his ash-smeared yellow overalls, his body shook from sheer physical and emotional exhaustion.

But Mr Adamson thinks he has been lucky. His wife Sharon and three sons, aged four, eight and 10, are alive.

While trying to protect a property at Dixons Creek, he looked up to see his home ablaze. He returned yesterday morning to find it smouldering and his two dogs dead.

"I saw the flames going up the hill and I saw our own house catch on fire and I thought, 'Well, it's too late for that now'," he said.

Mr Adamson said he believed up to 100 homes had been lost in the Dixons Creek and Yarra Glen areas.

The CFA volunteer of seven years said the devastation was even worse at Kinglake.

"It's just like a bomb blast, like street after street is just no longer there. You see fireplaces and remnants of tin roofs still there and car bodies, cars that are half alight still," he said.

"You move through that Kinglake area and off to Kinglake West and through Smiths Gully and just house after house after house, and car accidents everywhere and dead horses on the ground and cattle.

"At one stage on Saturday night I saw a sheep alight running through a paddock … it was just horrific."

Mr Adamson was among about 400 people who packed the memorial hall in Yarra Glen for a community meeting yesterday morning.

As fear and frustration simmered among the crowd, hostile questions were fired at emergency services speakers.

But Mr Adamson stepped onto the stage and said now was a time for unity not blame.

The crowd listened as he told them what he had been through and they applauded when he said there was only so much the CFA, SES and police could do and that people had to be patient.

"The ones who lost a home just be thankful you've got your own life," he said.

Outside the hall, as neighbours patted him on the back and shook his hand, Mr Adamson said the community had to pull together to get through the disaster and its aftermath.

"I'm not really worried about me, we'll cope and we'll move on but there's lots of people who won't," he said.

Mr Adamson said many of his fellow firefighters had battled blazes with severe burns and on two hours' sleep as the fire refused to let them rest.

"We were trying to finish up yesterday afternoon and every time we tried to finish up we just couldn't. There was another call and you just had to go to that one whether you could or you couldn't, or whether you had the physical ability to do so, you just had to go," he said.

"You just have to."