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Yarloop resident Marion Whitecross had experienced floods while living in Queensland and dry summers while living in Kalgoorlie.
But never a bushfire.
She and her husband had only been in Yarloop for two months and were in the midst of renovating an old house on Railway Parade when the town was gutted the evening of January 7.
That day, they had been pulling all the floorboards out and doing some nailing.
They had been keeping an eye on the hills but the fire seemed to be far away.
“We kept thinking all day ‘they’ll put it out, they’ll put it out and they’ll tell us when to go,” Ms Whitecross said.
“But that didn’t happen.”
About 8pm that night, Ms Whitecross thought the choppers flying overhead had put the fire out in the hills, so she and her husband went inside to have a cuppa.
A few minutes later popping and banging noises alerted the couple, who rushed outside.
“It was just across the road,” she said.
“We raced next door to tell the fella next door because we were going to help him with his horses but it was too late by then so we all had to just take off.”
Ms Whitecross grabbed a few clothes off the line and ushered her dogs to the car, but had to leave her two cats behind.
They drove to Australind evacuation centre where they stayed for two weeks, until they were allowed back in town.
“It was really unsettling, I just feel sorry for the people that lost everything,” Ms Whitecross said.
“Plus for ten months with the clean up we still had to drive past all the burnt down houses all the time.
“It was a bit disturbing.”
Ms Whitecross said they never received a warning, unlike other people who got one on their phones.
“They also said to us ‘why didn’t you have your computer going?’, well there’s no power so you can’t have your computer without power unless you have a good battery life,” she said.
“And coming from Kalgoorlie we didn’t have a wireless radio.
“Now we’ve sort of set up ourselves if something happens again but unless you’ve been through it before, you don’t know what to do.”
Ms Whitecross said life in Yarloop was slowly coming together, even though most of the few acquaintances she made in the two months she lived in town before the fires moved somewhere else.
However, the prospect of a new bushfire stays in the back of her mind.
“I think it scares all of us really,” she said.
“We are only just getting our lives back together, the last thing you want is for it to happen again.
”I think if it happened again I wouldn’t bother coming back, it’s too scary.”