After Cabramurra's destruction, the fires then raced through a remote part of the Kosciuszko National Park that is the site of Snowy Hydro's landmark 2.0 project.

Snowy Hydro CEO Paul Broad said he was anticipating significant loss of heavy machinery and communications equipment.

It is a further hit to the renewable energy project, which has already faced significant cost blowouts and delays.

Project under siege by fire

The weather station in Cabramurra recorded temperatures of 66.3 degrees Celsius when the blaze came through, with wind gusts up to 128 kilometres per hour.

The town was evacuated ahead of the fire front, which destroyed workers' houses, a school and a ski club.

"We had back-burnt, we had cleared areas … the fire did breach those barriers that we put in and just spread from one house to the next," Mr Broad said.

"A lot of memories have been burnt.

"We've got a video of the fire approaching and it is just unbelievable how quickly it hit us, within minutes it came over the hill and hit the site.

"We will rebuild, though. Let me be clear, we will rebuild … and do so in a way that will protect us all from the future fires that will inevitably come."

Workers attempted to fire-proof the remote Snowy 2.0 site before evacuating, and are currently unable to access the site to inspect the damage.

Mr Broad expected only a short setback to the exploratory works for the new hydro power plant.

"We would have lost a significant amount of equipment, it would become very dangerous now with trees falling, so the clean-up will be fairly large," he said.

"But … it won't stop us, probably hold us up a few weeks, maybe a month."

Victoria's power in the firing line

The weekend's blaze saw a "fireball" flare over Snowy Hydro's biggest hydro generator, Tumut 3.

Mr Broad praised the Rural Fire Service crews that protected the power station, crediting them with keeping power supplied to NSW during the crisis.

But with weather conditions forecast to deteriorate this weekend, there could be yet more problems for Snowy Hydro.

"Our major concern for this weekend is on the Murray side, which is the southern side of our scheme and that's where we primarily supply into Victoria," Mr Broad said.

"We're concerned about that because the direction of that fire is heading towards a very small town called Khancoban.

"Our number one concern is Khancoban and … the Murray 1 and Murray 2 power stations."

Local MP compares damage to war zone

The task of rebuilding bushfire-torn New South Wales has been compared to wartime reconstruction of places like Iraq and Bosnia by the region's federal MP.

Mike Kelly's electorate of Eden-Monaro covers the NSW South Coast and Snowy Mountains, which have been decimated by the fires.

The former soldier said only in his time serving in the Army had he seen communities so devastated.

"I've had a number of deployments to places like Somalia, Timor, Bosnia and Iraq and the sort of scale of reconstruction efforts there are the only thing I can compare it with," he said.

"There's going to need to be a really concerted and long-term effort to rebuild lives and businesses as we go forward from here."

"It's really devastating right across the region, the hundreds of hundreds of homes [lost], the property damage, the damage to small businesses."

Dr Kelly also pointed to the damage to major industries, including forestry and Snowy Hydro's operations.

He estimated bushfires had burned about $70 million worth of plantation timber on the south-west slopes of the mountain.

The plantations are a key source of income for the region and their destruction will also affect sawmills in Eden and Bombala.

"We have some of the largest sawmills in the southern hemisphere there," Dr Kelly said.

"With the loss of resource, that's just something that will pose huge questions for the viability of these businesses."