Sitting in a Bunyip cafe with other frightened locals, Andrew Clarke looked up at a TV screen to see a house on his vineyard explode in a massive fireball.
The devastated farmer fled his property late on Saturday with his wife and kids, alongside many others who live at the edge of the Bunyip State Park.
He returned shortly after to rescue his two dogs, Blue and Pappy, defying police orders and roaring through a roadblock to reach his property which lies at the foothills of the Black Snake Ranges."We’ve got a 130 million gallon dam and the water bombers were pulling water out of that but we still lost everything," he said.An aerial view of a house exploding in a massive fireball in Tonimbuk in the Bunyip State Forest. Mr Clarke believes it is his property.
He originally made Jinks Creek wine from an old apple shed and later upgraded it to a new winery in 2003.The restaurant though remained in a refurbished 100-year-old woolshed until being lost to Sunday's fire.Mr Clarke said he was lucky to secure a hotel in Warragul on Sunday night that will allow his family to keep his aging Staffordshire terrier and border collie close.
This isn’t Mr Clarke’s first fire though. In 1983 and 2009, the farmer says fire burnt through the nearby area."I’ve been living down there for a very long time and this is the worst fire I’ve seen," he said.The Bunyip fire had ripped through more than 10,000 hectares and was threatening more than seven towns on Sunday night.
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