Sydney - It seems simple enough: the warning comes in of an approaching forest fire and householders decide whether to stay or go.

Some are confident of their abilities and level of planning and opt to put up a fight to save their homes. Others just jump in the car and flee.

"Warning! What warning?" asks Wade Horton, who had a plan but still lost his house in Saturday's blazes north of Melbourne. "The smoke was coming over all day, but from what we could tell it was miles away, and then I walked up the front and I saw it hit the top of the mountain and within a minute it was down to the bottom of the valley and that whole valley across the other side was a wall of fire."

It was Melbourne's hottest day, the winds favoured the fire, and some say the best-laid plans by the best-drilled firefighters were of no use against it.

"Some of these fires just weren't possible to control," Victoria state Premier John Brumby said. "You've had firefighters that were literally facing flames that were four storeys high."

Brumby wants householders to be advised to leave right away and not put up a fight. It's a call that fire brigades across the country oppose.

"What we say is that if you are caught in a fire you are better off being protected in a structure than out in the open," says Perth fire chief Craig Hynes. "You've also got to know that making a late decision is absolutely fatal. You don't want to be caught in a vehicle because vehicles are just not the place to be in the onset of a bushfire."

The roads in the fire zone are littered with burned-out vehicles in which people were incinerated while trying to get away. There were collisions, cars slamming into trees, concertina crashes - all because people panicked and smoke had cut visibility to just a few metres.

"It looks as though there's a hell of a lot of carnage on the road," Wollongong University bushfire expert Ross Bradstock said. "There's pretty concrete evidence that you're much safer staying with your building."

What kills in forest fires is their massive radiant heat. Organs stop function and people die. A building, even one that is itself on fire, provides some protection against the searing heat.

On Saturday those who ran to open ground were killed. Those who stayed in, huddled under wet blankets at floor level, had a much better survival rate.

John Handmer, a safety expert at Melbourne's RMIT university, stresses that in Saturday's maelstrom a quick exit might have been the best strategy.

"Saturday was the worst fire day in recorded history," he said. "A day like that can overwhelm all our preparations."

In the refuges for the thousands made homeless by the fires, survivors swap stories of valiant attempts to save homes that were ultimately unsuccessful but which may well have kept them alive.

Some fought the flames to their very doorsteps, stamping out embers in their yards and even chain-sawing bits of burning timber off their houses.

And there were other survivors that made an early decision to leave. They lived too.

"When you hear the roar of the fire, you're not going to stand there with a garden hose and a few buckets," said Bruce Morrow. "We literally ran out of our house."

Hynes, who is adamant that the current fire brigade advice stands, worries that a change would lead to dithering and death.

"You're either a stayer or a goer - and you should know that," he said. (dpa)