A "catastrophic" fire day

has been forecast. 
Like a good little cat I went out and watered some plants this morning but I wonder whether they will survive another day of 46'C heat and, this time, winds with it.
We live just below the foothills. While I was watering I looked up and thought of all the housing which is tucked into the bush land up there. 
It's a crazy place to live. More and more people have moved there for "the life style". This is supposed to be "quiet" and "surrounded by natural beauty". The reality is that it is neither. The increased population means it is no longer quiet. Even more serious is that the ideas people have about "natural beauty" mean that they are making a mess of the landscape. They think it means you should not remove anything. The fire load up there is horrendous.
If we are lucky there won't be a catastrophe up there - but it will be luck and not good management.
So far we have escaped the appalling conditions in the neighbouring states. My brother lives in a semi-rural area. He and his partner have a "fire plan". Their car is packed with a few essentials. They are on "watch and act" still but we all know that can change in a matter of minutes.
We grew up in rural areas. We know the danger of fire better than people who have never had any contact with one. I can remember the frightening feeling of not being able to breathe properly and the fear of "what if they don't manage to put the fire out before it gets to the house?" I remember standing in the school's domestic science unit in the early hours of the morning making sandwiches. That was after my brother and I had helped to get the school sheep into our back garden, filled the overhead tank and were spraying them and the house to stop any embers catching.  I was fifteen and the perspiration dripping off me was nothing compared with the real exhaustion of the men who came in to eat the sandwiches. 
They would spray retardant now but there was no way to do that back then. What we did was in no way extraordinary. There were boys my brother's age fighting along with the men at the front line on an island with a very limited water supply. I doubt they would be allowed to do it now but things were very different back then.
And what really stuns me is that some of the fires have been deliberately lit or started to sheer stupidity. They lost forty houses yesterday alone, some of them not that far from my brother's home. They have lost thousands of square kilometres of animal habitat too.
Somebody told me yesterday, "The bush will grow again Cat."
I just wanted to walk away.  The person who said that has absolutely no idea.