A WEEK after bushfires started blazing across parts of southern Australia, the country was still coming to grips with one of the most traumatic events in its peacetime history. The fires that erupted on February 7th in Victoria, the second-most populous state, killed more than 180 people. Police say the toll could reach 300. The final count will be left to authorities with the grim task of sifting through landscapes blackened by flames so ferocious that they melted car parts and devoured buildings in seconds.

In one of Australia's hottest summer seasons on record, about 50 fires also raged across New South Wales, the most populous state, without loss of life. But it was neighbouring Victoria that bore the most devastating brunt. The state is prone to hot winds driving in from deserts, fanning flames whose “scale and savagery”, says Stephen Pyne, an American fire expert, “have no equal elsewhere on earth.”

This week's fires easily outstripped the worst two previous ones: “Black Friday” in January 1939, when 71 people died in Victoria; and “Ash Wednesday” in February 1983, which took 75 lives in Victoria and neighbouring South Australia. This time, a prolonged drought gripping south-east Australia, and temperatures staying above 40°C for days, made for a lethally dry terrain to fuel the flames.

More than 30 fires spread from Horsham, in western Victoria, to the Latrobe Valley in the east, burning out 360,000 hectares (868,000 acres). The worst raged in a mountainous region only 70km (43 miles) north of Melbourne, and almost wiped out Kinglake and Marysville, two idyllic old towns; up to one-fifth of Marysville's 500 residents might have died. Ian Pearson, a Marysville survivor, described the town now as “the inside of hell”.

As firefighting crews battled the blazes, authorities blamed arsonists for starting some, and even relighting others that had been brought under control. Police have arrested two suspected looters and are treating some locations as crime scenes. After touring Victoria for two days, Kevin Rudd, the prime minister, called the deliberate lighting of fires “mass murder”.

Australians put aside their obsession with grim economic news, and responded to one of their country's worst natural disasters with a mixture of grief and grit akin to wartime. They donated almost A$34m ($22m) to help ravaged communities and about 5,000 people left homeless, on top of A$15m Mr Rudd pledged.

Fires, floods and drought are part of Australia's national legend: “her beauty and her terror”, as Dorothea Mackellar wrote in a 1908 poem recited by every Australian schoolchild ever since. Yet the human cost of this catastrophe shocked even fire experts. A commission of inquiry set up by John Brumby, Victoria's premier, will examine Australia's fire-management strategy. Controlled burning in cooler months, to reduce fuel loads, was given up in many places after city people protested about smoke hazes. The government of Victoria's advice to people in fire paths—leave early or fortify properties and stay—seems to have unravelled. Kevin Tolhurst, a Melbourne ecologist, suggests many were overwhelmed, fled at the last minute—“the worst time”—and were trapped.

Debate has started, too, about the fire's intensity. Some are linking Australia's heatwave and decade-long drought to climate change. In a report to Mr Rudd's government late last year Ross Garnaut, an economist, forecast that the number of days each year in Melbourne hotter than 35°C will rise from nine now to 21 in 2070. He said fire seasons were projected to start earlier, end later and be more intense. Mr Rudd has promised that shattered townships will be rebuilt “brick by brick”. It may also be worth considering precisely where and how they should be built.