Assessing the damage near her property just outside Melbourne's fringe, Louise Whitefield remembers the smell of the fire.
"When I smell smoke, I'm paranoid," she says.
A large grassfire ran through her Gisborne block in 2014, destroying everything but her family's home.
So when a similar fire approached last Friday, the smell of smoke was her first warning sign. She swung into action with her partner Brian and their daughter, calling triple-0 and readying water.
By the time she looked back outside to the nearby paddock where the fire was spreading, she says, "the flames were up — I could see them reaching up above the treetops".
"Then I just panicked because everything flooded back to me," she says.
Ms Whitefield is emotional and full of thanks to the Country Fire Authority (CFA) as she describes the relief of a fire brigade arriving in time to stop the blaze from reaching her and her neighbours' homes.
"It travels so fast," she says.
Ms Whitefield's home is just minutes from Melbourne's ever-expanding urban fringe, where suburbs meet grasslands.
It's an area authorities say is at an increased risk of fires after months of wet weather has caused huge amounts of grass growth.
The 2022 spring was the state's wettest since records began in 1900, and the lead-up to Victoria's summer was marked by floods across much of the state.
Now, the weather has warmed. Last week, Melbourne hit 40 degrees Celsius for the first time in three years.
It was the same day the state enacted its first total fire ban since early 2020 — and the day fire neared Ms Whitefield's home.
"In many parts of these communities and across Victoria, there's very, very thick, dry grass now that we've had the hot, dry winds through the grasslands," the CFA's Nicky Haslinghouse says.
"And that grass has cured and dried out such that if we have a fire, grassfires will move very quickly. They'll spread easily and they'll be very hot."
On Sunday, more than 20 fire trucks responded to a grassfire in Grangefields, east of Melton. At about the same time, crews brought a grassfire under control in nearby Strathtulloh.
Last week, three people were treated for smoke inhalation after a five-hectare blaze in Bulla, north of the airport, destroyed at least one property.
Ms Haslinghouse is a community liaison bushfire engagement facilitator with the CFA, which has been working with the Hume council to run information sessions with residents on the peri-urban fringe.
The recent focus has been Mickleham, about 40 kilometres north of Melbourne's CBD in the Hume council area.
"A lot of our residents that are moving out here in Mickleham don't actually realise that they're on that urban interface," Hume emergency management officer Tina Georgiev says.
"They think they're in the suburbs and they don't realise that they've got a grassfire risk pretty much across the road from them."
According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data, the population of the Mickleham-Yuroke area has grown by 1,400 per cent over the past decade, from an estimated population of 1,402 in 2011 to 23,731 in 2021.
About half of the residents were born overseas and many have moved into new housing estates at the very edge of the suburb.
"It was very insightful, the way they have explained things and how we can be in danger even if we're not close to bushland," Ashok Kumar says after the session.
A key message from the sessions is for residents to move two streets back if they are in a risk area, rather than jump in their cars to drive away.
Many of the new estates only have one main road in and out.
"We've got a lot of communities here that have got narrow roads, and once you've got traffic trying to get each way and people confused, there's really no way for vehicles if they're private vehicles or fire trucks to get access," Ms Haslinghouse says.
She says the purpose of the sessions is not to make people fearful but instead to help them get prepared.
"It's about being aware of the risk, preparing your own property to withstand the impact of fire if you are threatened by fire, preparing yourself and your family so that you have a good bushfire and grassfire plan, to take the steps early that you need to to stay safe," she says.
Authorities are warning the wetter-than-usual spring means the fire season could last into March or even April.
