Bushfire ravages Australian town

A bushfire near a small West Australian town has wiped out more property than any single disaster in the state since 1961 - and suspicions are focusing on one fallen power line.

More than 200 bereft people descended on the small wheatbelt town of Toodyay on Tuesday night, after 38 homes went up in flames along with stock, farm buildings and machinery in a natural disaster certain to cost tens of millions of dollars.

"One hundred million is the figure being bandied about," said Fire and Emergency Services media officer Allen Gale on Thursday.

Three firefighters and a resident received minor injuries battling the blaze, but no one was killed as the fire devoured thousands of hectares of bushland and pasture.

FESA described the fire as being on the "worst scale", and said the accompanying 40-degree-Celsius temperatures and strong northerly winds had set the scene for a "catastrophic result".

It was WA's first test of new bushfire safety provisions which require people to leave their homes if advised to do so, rather than stay and attempt to save their homes.

The new telephone-based emergency warning system was adopted nationally following the devastating Black Saturday fires in Victoria last February when 173 lives were lost.

FESA chief operations officer Craig Hynes said the fact that no lives were lost appeared to validate the new regime.

He was initially fearful of a "backlash" from people who had lost their homes but believed they may have been able to save them if allowed to stay.

Many anxious residents were angry at being prevented from returning to their properties in the fire-affected areas until Thursday morning.

But among the hundreds who attended a public meeting at the Toodyay's Town Hall on Wednesday, spilling into the streets outside, no one spoke out against the advice to leave their homes.

Occasionally, a voice was raised in anger at the blanket ban on fire victims returning to their properties.

Almost without exception, it seemed, people saw the merits of the new system and had accepted the requirement to leave.

There were dozens of stories of alarm and dread at the sight of the huge fire front advancing on homes - moving too fast for most to harbour any thought of staying to defend their properties.

Artist and writer Caroline Coate was told by police on Tuesday evening that they were coming to pick her up at her home about 5km south of Toodyay.

She told them she had her own car and would get out immediately.

Half an hour down the road she looked back and saw "something I could only describe as rivers of lava, and I knew my home was gone".

"I was just glad I got out when I did."

Of more concern to residents were the rumours circulating around Toodyay early on Wednesday that a fallen power line had caused the devastating blaze.

WA Premier Colin Barnett, who owns a local property that was not touched by the fire, was among the officials fronting the first meeting of residents at noon on Wednesday.

"Tell us what caused it," said one angry resident.

Mr Barnett had been with Mr Hynes earlier when the FESA officer told reporters the fire had started near power infrastructure but refused to comment further.

At the meeting, the official line remained that the cause of the blaze was under investigation.

But later that day, police sources confirmed that a fallen power line was believed to have started the fire.

State energy utility Western Power officially acknowledged the possibility that one of its power lines was responsible for the blaze in a statement issued at 7.24pm (WST).

"Initial investigations indicate that the fire originated in the vicinity of power lines," Western Power managing director Doug Aberle said, adding that the fire had burnt 120 poles and 55 transformers.

The utility has been forced to defend its use of timber poles, as calls mount for them to be replaced with metal ones.

On Thursday, spokesman Mark de Laetera said Western Power understood the anger of residents, but said there were a number of reasons wooden poles were superior to steel.

"Cost effectiveness, safety, the fact that steel poles can fail, people may think that they are absolutely safe in fires but they're not," he said.

WA Energy Minister Peter Collier said an investigation in the next fortnight would determine whether the fallen power line had caused the fire and whether Western Power could face civil charges.

"If it was the cause, we will also investigate why it happened," he said.

Several bushfires in recent years in WA have been blamed on fallen power lines, including two incidents in which people died.

Twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher Michelle Mack was killed near Toodyay in 2007 after two power lines clashed and caused a bushfire.

Ms Mack died when her car rolled as she attempted to escape the blaze and she was thrown from the vehicle.

No blame was apportioned, and EnergySafety, WA's energy industry safety regulator, was unable to say why the two power lines had clashed.

Western Power was fined A$17,500 ($21,957) in 2005 after fallen power lines were found to have caused the bushfire that killed Judith Ward, 59, and Lorraine Melia, 46, near the Albany Highway, in the state's southwest, in December 2003.

Mr Collier said the power poles in the Toodyay area had been inspected in May 2007 and no maintenance work was deemed necessary.

"If that's the case, and they were inspected, and in fact they were responsible for the fire ... what we need to do is determine exactly whether the maintenance program is sufficient, is adequate," he said.

He said the inquiries would seek to determine whether Western Power had been negligent in its maintenance of power poles.

What is not under question is the Toodyay fire's ranking as one of the most expensive natural disasters in WA history.

Cyclone Vance struck the Pilbara coast in March 1999, damaging 10 per cent of the buildings in Exmouth and wreaking a trail of destruction all the way to the Goldfields city of Kalgoorlie.

But as Mr Gale pointed out, the cyclone had damaged rather than destroyed buildings, and was therefore not considered to be as catastrophic as the Toodyay fires.

Property damage from the Toodyay fire is the worst since fires in the state's south-west in January 1961, when the small towns of Dwellingup and Karridale were largely destroyed, along with a number of smaller railway and mill settlements.

A large number of homes were also destroyed in Pinjarra, one of the district's major towns.

A number of the tiny timber towns that were burnt out were never rebuilt.

As in the Toodyay fires, scores of people were left homeless, but there was no loss of life.

A royal commission found that back-burning procedures had been partly responsible for the fires. The safety of power poles was apparently not called into question.

But if some of the Toodyay shire's timber power poles are more than 40 years old, as one resident suggested, they are unlikely to survive another royal commission.

- AAP