Australian towns evacuated over Christmas as bushfires rage

Residents of a bushfire-ravaged area of ​​Australia were given two hours to return home to collect their belongings before Christmas on Tuesday, as emergency workers scrambled to contain the blaze.

Areas around the Grampians, in Victoria, were evacuated amid warnings from authorities that the situation in the coming days could be the worst since Australia’s worst fire season, dubbed the “Black Summer” of 2019-2020.

The wildfire has already burned more than 41,000 hectares (101,000 acres) of land in the past week, but there have been no deaths or property losses.

The intense heat on Boxing Day has also prompted numerous fire warnings across the country.

Across Victoria, temperatures are expected to reach 40C (104F) with strong dry winds, while parts of South Australia and New South Wales could also face bushfires Thursday to Friday.

“We expect to see the worst disaster in the world,” Luke Hegarty, a spokesman for Victoria’s State Control Centre, said.

“This is the biggest fire accident that the government has seen – across all the regions of the government we are talking about – since the Black Summer. It is important for people to understand that Thursday is a day with great power,” he added.

Four international fire brigades and two incident management teams – made up of more than 100 people – will arrive in Victoria in the coming days to provide support to emergency workers who have been working around the clock to tackle the blaze.

The idea to give families around the Grampians access to their homes “to get Christmas items … presents and stuff” was made on Tuesday morning by Country Fire Authority (CFA) chief Jason Heffernan.

“[This is] to ensure that the people living in Hall Gap are moved by Christmas, maybe they will get what they need,” he told Seven’s Sunrise programme.

Mary Ann Brown, who lives in the southern Grampians National Park, told the ABC that people in her community were about to go on holiday.

“We won’t be out of the woods until we get a really good rain and that probably won’t come until March or April, so it’s going to be a long summer.”

Some parts of Australia have been on high alert for bushfire danger this summer, following several relatively quiet seasons compared to the 2019-2020 bushfires. associated with hundreds of deaths and swept 24 million hectares of land.

The country has moved from disaster to disaster in recent years, experiencing floods and extreme heat, as it feels the effects of climate change.