They are still there, spending their time helping others affected by one of the largest natural disasters to hit the region.

At 11.35am on March 27, Kim was working in the CFA district office in Geelong, while husband Ian was already busy fighting a small fire that had broken out at nearby Linton.

Then Kim’s pager alerted her to a new fire, a larger fire. The address: her place.

“The last thing I said to Ian before I went off to work was ‘It’s a bad fire day today, don’t let the house burn down, dear’.”

“Then the pager goes off and it’s our place. I knew the house was undefended, I knew nobody was home and I knew half the brigade was off at Linton.”

Kim said she thought there was “no way” the house could survive because initial information put their property right in front of the fire front.

But the fire began just metres behind their property and headed in the opposite direction.

“It wasn’t for two hours that I found out whether or not we had a house or not,” she said.

“I had to convince somebody to go and have a look for me to see if it was still there.”

Ian’s day put him in the heart of the firefighting action to save the community.

“I was crew leader on tanker one that day – I could actually see what was coming when we were driving through it,” he said.

“You find yourself in a mindset of ‘we’ve got a house under threat and we don’t even know if somebody is in there’ ... there’s no time for anything else,” he said.

“At that time, I thought lives could have definitely been lost.”