As Brendan Clarke stood at the baggage carousel, panicked text messages came in thick and fast.
"It doesn't sort of set in, I suppose, until you drive up there and then you just see the last little bits of tin and little trickles of fire still going where the house was," Brendan Clarke tells 9Honey. Not only were the couple uninsured, but the blaze was about 400m from their property, and not, like others in the region, burning a path to their front door.
"I've always worked in the coal mines and that's why we weren't insured, because you're always away for more than half a year with work, and most of the insurers wouldn't touch it because you weren't there enough."He speaks candidly about seeing the smouldering ruins of his once-home and his reaction.
"There was nothing at all, you couldn't have found a scrap of timber lift in the house. Where the bathroom screen was just melted bits of glass on the ground. There was nothing, not one thing." "I work in a good job and we were sort of starting to semi look at retirement, but it's sort of cleaned all our money out to do what we do. Life is what it is, and we're sort of just trying to do what we can to get there, and I guess power is power."