Within twelve hours, more than 180 fires fanned by hot winds of up to 110 km/h (68 mph) caused widespread destruction across the states of Victoria and South Australia.

[4] Years of severe drought and extreme weather combined to create one of Australia's worst fire days in a century.

[8][9] The speed and ferocity of the flames, aided by abundant fuels and a landscape immersed in smoke, made fire suppression and containment impossible.

[10] In many cases, residents fended for themselves as fires broke communications, cut off escape routes and severed electricity and water supplies.

[11] Up to 8,000 people were evacuated in Victoria at the height of the crisis and a state of disaster was declared for the first time in South Australia's history.

[1][14] The emergency saw the largest number of volunteers called to duty from across Australia at the same time—an estimated 130,000 firefighters, defence force personnel, relief workers and support crews.

[15] On Ash Wednesday in 1980 (20 February) during a virtually rainless summer after a very wet spring in 1979, bushfires swept through the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, destroying 51 houses.

As 1982 came to a close, large areas of eastern Australia lay devastated by a prolonged drought thought to be caused by the El Niño climatic cycle.

This combination further destabilised an already volatile fire situation in the forested upland areas surrounding the Victorian and South Australian capitals of Melbourne and Adelaide.

Leading a dry cool change and preceded by record temperatures, the dust storm cut visibility in Melbourne to 100 metres, creating near darkness for almost an hour.

Temperatures around Melbourne and Adelaide quickly rose above 43 °C (109 °F), with winds gusting up to 100 km/h (62 mph) and relative humidity plunging to as low as 6 per cent.

Within hours, multiple reports of breaking fires quickly began to deluge Victoria's and South Australia's emergency services.

[24] Murray Nicoll, a journalist from radio station 5DN and resident of the Adelaide Hills, reported live from his local area where five people died: At the moment, I'm watching my house burn down.

At this time, this part of the Adelaide Hills was still not connected to the mains water supply, so all of the houses had only petrol-powered pumps and rainwater tanks.

[citation needed] At 3:15 pm on Wednesday, Mr and Mrs Morgan went to pick up their children from the local school and kindergarten.

[26] The most disastrous factor in the Ash Wednesday fires occurred just before nightfall when a fierce and dry wind change swept across South Australia and Victoria.

[27] The near-cyclonic strength of the wind change created an unstoppable firestorm[28] that produced tornado-like fire whirls and fireballs of eucalyptus gas measuring over three metres across.

[29] CSIROTooltip Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation experts later reported that, from evidence of melted metal, the heat of the fires after the change rose to 2,000 °C (3,630 °F), exceeding that recorded during the Allied bombing of Dresden in World War II.

In fact, the Ash Wednesday fires were measured at around 60,000 kilowatts of heat energy per metre, leading to similarities with the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Burning all night, the morning after Ash Wednesday, first light revealed the devastation of the popular coastal towns along the Great Ocean Road such as Aireys Inlet, Anglesea and Lorne resembled barren moonscapes.

The fire on the coast had been so intense that firefighters were forced to abandon all control efforts and let it burn until it reached the ocean, destroying everything in its path.

A variety of equipment was used, including 400 vehicles (fire-trucks, water tankers and dozers), 11 helicopters and 14 fixed wing aircraft.

[2] For the next quarter century, Ash Wednesday was used as the measure for all bushfire emergencies in Australia; though since 2009, that has been supplemented by the lessons learned from Black Saturday.

[37] Commemoration sites have been set up in areas that were hit worst by the fires, with museums hosting exhibits inviting survivors to tell their stories.