Thomas Fox doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.

As publican of the Ironclad Hotel, one of the most easily-identifiable buildings in Marble Bar, in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, he has been fielding calls from the media all day.

Shortly before he spoke to Guardian Australia he took a call from the BBC. Midway through the conversation he tells me to turn on Seven News. They’re talking about Marble Bar too.

The isolated town is within a whisker of breaking a 100-year-old record for its hottest ever day.

At 1.54pm local time, the temperature at the Bureau of Meteorology’s measuring station at Marble Bar was 48.9C. It has to get more than 0.3 of a degree hotter to break its hottest recorded temperature of 49.2C, reached on 11 January 1905, and again on 3 January 1922.

That’s not WA’s hottest day – that honour lies with Mardie, 540 kilometres away on the coast, which reached 50.5C on 19 February 1998.

Duty forecaster Adam Conroy said Marble Bar could still get to the record. The day started well, reaching 40 degrees before 8am.

But the hoped-for 50C day – hoped for by media outlets and weather nerds, not by locals – was slipping out of reach.

That’s quite okay by Fox, whose struggling air conditioner is keeping the pub at a comparatively cool 28 degrees for the comfort of three drinkers who are in there at midday.

“Life goes on, it’s hot every day up here,” he said. “But if you are in the fortunate position of planning things, you probably don’t plan to dig a hole at two in the afternoon.”

Not everyone in the area has that luxury. The town, which had a population of just under 200 at last census, is still mainly supported by stations. There are mines nearby – in the Pilbara use of the term that can mean anywhere from 20km to 200km away – but Landcruisers and high-vis gear have not yet pushed out other concerns.

Which means that if the windmill powering the stock watering trough breaks down on a 49C day, you have to climb up and fix it.

Fox says the town isn’t greedy about its reputation as the hottest place in WA, earned in the 1920s when it sweated through 100 days straight of more than 40 degrees.

A sign as you enter the town reads, “A warm welcome from Australia’s hottest town”.

Fox bought the pub as an “impulse buy” in 2010 and spent the first summer there without air-conditioning, a mistake he said his bar staff would not let him forget.

He won’t elaborate on how he ended up in Marble Bar (“There’s no good reason to end up in Marble Bar.”) but admits the town is home to “a peculiar bunch”.

“There is a sense of pride in it. In the summer everyone buggers off, and it’s hot,” he said.

“In winter it’s beautiful and everyone’s around, and people say, ‘oh, it’s not the hottest town in Australia’.

“It’s like, ‘yeah? Come back in January, dickhead’.”

His advice for surviving the heat is quite similar to the instructions your mum would give you for a day at the beach. Drink a lot of water. Stay out of the sun.

But the risk is much greater. Two men have died in the West Australian outback of heat exposure so far this year, after they decided to walk away from their stricken vehicles to get help.

The deaths prompted authorities to warn drivers not to venture on to remote roads unless they were fully prepared, and not to abandon their vehicles.

Or, as Fox puts it: “If you drive from here to Port Hedland and your car breaks down and you don’t have enough water, you are fucked.”

At Port Hedland, about 200km down the road, Sam Vadala has just picked her son up from the skate park, because it was too hot to ride back. The temperature gauge in her car is only showing 35.9 degrees, but it is forecast to reach 47 degrees by afternoon.

Vadala moved to Port Hedland from Perth with her husband and two children in 2011, when her husband switched from fly-in-fly-out to a residential position at BHP.

She thinks it takes about a year to acclimatise, and her advice is familiar. Drink a lot of water. Stay out of the sun.

“If you can make it through one summer you can make it through any summer,” she said. “It’s a very big shock to the system to anyone who comes up here.”

The air-conditioning in their company house is never switched off. They are lucky enough to have a pool, which provides some relief during the start of summer. As the season wears on it starts to heat up and take on the character of second-hand bathwater.

“It also keeps losing water from evaporation so you have to top it up, but that doesn’t help because the water from the hose is also warm.”

There’s always Pretty Pool, an inlet and the town’s most popular swimming beach, which backs on to the Vadala’s house. A recent crocodile alert isn’t enough to keep the locals away – as we talk, Vadala says a group of children are splashing in the shallows.

Constable Derek Canning moved to Western Australia from Northern Ireland as part of Western Australia’s police’s UK recruiting drive. He was stationed in Port Hedland six months ago.

So far, he says, he’s coping quite well – so long as he doesn’t have to get out of the air-conditioned car.

“I’ve come from the north-west of Ireland to the north West of Australia, from -25C to 50C,” he said. “There’s quite a few Pommy people up here, we all seem to get on with it.”

A local temperature gauge in the streets of Marble Bar declared the temperature to be 49.7C at 3.18pm, but the official Bureau of Meteorology peak was 49.0 degrees at 3.12pm, just 0.2C shy of the record.

The party poppers at the bureau’s West Australian office will be shelved for another day. But meteorologists can take solace in knowing that the weather was, for once, exactly what they forecast.