A few days ago Marysville was an idyllic tourist spot 60 miles from the heart of Melbourne: a quaint subalpine township with the bubbling Steavenson River a magnet for fly-fishermen.

Today it is a pile of ash. Marysville has become known as the Ground Zero of the devastating bushfires that ravaged Victoria last weekend, killing 181 people, destroying more than 1,800 homes and making more than 7,000 people homeless. Entire streets were vaporised by bushfires that killed 100 of the town’s 500 population. Many more are missing.

Among the rubble of the town only 12 buildings are left standing. The wooden sign advertising a B&B stands upright, but behind it there is only a brick chimney and a pile of twisted corrugated iron. Dead, bloated cows line the roads alongside burnt-out cars, and all that is left of the school is the melted swings.

“I never want to go back there again,” said John Munday, a Country Fire Authority firefighter who was among the crews called into Marysville from surrounding areas to confront the approaching blaze. He said that the deadly nature of the inferno that was about to engulf the town dawned on the fire crew about ten minutes before the flames hit.

“We had enough time to put out one spot fire before we very quickly came to the realisation that this was so severe and fast and fierce that there was no way any of us could do any firefighting,” he told The Times.

“I’ve been around a long time and I’ve seen a lot of fires, but this was so far off the other end of the scale. We were totally helpless, we had a tank full of water and all the equipment and the skills to use it, but there was nothing we could do.”

With frightened people running down the street behind the fire truck, the crews retreated to the town oval, the only place considered safe. They had no option but to enforce what the fire service call an entrapment procedure until the blaze had passed.

“I saw people who I knew were probably going to die,” Mr Munday said. “But there was nothing I could do, my responsibility was to get my crew home safe . . . it wasn’t a lack of courage or bravery, it was just physically impossible. The conditions were so bad there was no hope.”

Some, finding humour among the tragedy, are calling their home town “Ashville”, but the joke hides the pain and grief that, a week on, is just starting to set in.

Alan Ryan, 49, likened the destruction of the hamlet to the bombing of Dresden in 1945. “The firestorm that enveloped the town is something that I'll never forget,” he told the Australian Associated Press from a tent city in nearby Alexandra. “The people that have been back there said it’s absolute decimation, everything is just powder and ash. It’s a modern-day Dresden.”

He is one of the hundreds of survivors from Marysville who will be bused back to the town today to see what is left of their homes. No one will be allowed to leave the buses, and no cameras or other recording devices will be allowed in, because it is still considered a crime scene.

At a meeting yesterday they were warned by police that they may see things that will haunt them forever, including a giant freezer truck that sits in what is left of the main street, housing the remains of their friends and neighbours.

- A 39-year-old Australian man from Churchill, Victoria – where 21 people died in the fires – has been charged with arson (Sophie Tedmanson writes). He has been moved to a secret location amid fears of a backlash among friends and relatives of victims. The man, whose name has been withheld, has been charged with one count of arson causing death, one of intentionally or recklessly causing a bushfire and one of possessing child pornography. He will appear in a Melbourne court on Monday.

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