3:15 pm on Wednesday, Mr and Mrs Morgan went to pick up their children from the local school and kindergarten. "Three quarters of an hour later the roof was burning", said Mr Morgan. Flames across the road and road blocks prevented the family from returning to the house, until it was burnt to the ground. "It's worth nothing now", said Mr Morgan. All of these houses have since been restored and are privately owned. Mount Lofty House has since been turned into a boutique hotel. St Michael's House, a mansion converted to an Anglican theological college and priory in the 1940s, was also burnt in the fires, but not restored and the whole site has since been cleared, leaving only the ruins of the gate house. More than 60 per cent of the houses lost in South Australia were in the Mount Lofty Ranges. Of the 26 people who died in South Australia, 12 were in metropolitan areas, including four in the Adelaide suburb of Greenhill. Wind change The most disastrous factor in the Ash Wednesday fires occurred just before nightfall when a fierce and dry wind change swept across South Australia and Victoria. This abruptly changed the direction and dramatically increased the intensity of the fires. The long corridors of flame that had been driven all day by the strong northerly were suddenly hit by gale-force south-westerly winds and became enormous fire fronts, many kilometres wide, with wind reportedly moving faster than 110 km/h. The near-cyclonic strength of the wind change created an unstoppable firestorm that produced tornado-like fire whirls and fireballs of eucalyptus gas measuring over three metres across. Survivors reported that the roar of the fire front was similar to that of a jet engine, though multiplied fifty, a hundred times. The change in temperature and air pressure was so savage that houses were seen exploding before fire could touch them. A resident of Aireys Inlet, on Victoria's western coast, was quoted: Unusual phenomena arising from the extreme conditions were reported. One survivor was startled to see a burning mattress hurtling through the air. Others noted road surfaces that bubbled and caught fire. experts later reported that, from evidence of melted metal, the heat of the fires after the change rose to 2,000 °C, exceeding that recorded during the Allied bombing of Dresden in World War II. In fact, the Ash Wednesday fires were measured at around