Mega-fire could last weeks
Two wildfires merged to form a massive inferno in southeast Australia yesterday, near where a man suffered serious burns while protecting a home during a night of treacherous conditions in the nation’s unprecedented fire crisis.
Authorities were assessing the damage after firefighters battled flames fanned by strong winds through the night and lightning strikes sparked new blazes in New South Wales and Victoria.
Conditions were milder yesterday, and are forecast to remain relatively benign for the next week.
‘‘In the scheme of things, we did OK,’’ Victorian Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp said.
New South Wales Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons told reporters that officials were ‘‘extremely relieved’’ the fires had not been more destructive overnight.
A man suffered burns while protecting a home near Tumbarumba in southern NSW, and was airlifted to a Sydney hospital in a serious condition to undergo surgery, Fitzsimmons said.
With no heavy rain expected, the 640,000-hectare blaze that formed when two fires joined in the Snowy Mountains region near Tumbarumba, close to the Victorian border, was expected to burn for weeks, officials said.
The fire crisis has killed at least 26 people, destroyed more than 2000 homes and scorched an area larger than the US state of Indiana since September.
It also has brought accusations that Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s conservative government needs to take more action to counter climate change, which experts say is worsening the blazes.
Thousands of protesters rallied on Friday in Sydney and Melbourne, calling for Morrison to be fired and for Australia to take tougher action on global warming. They carried placards saying, ‘‘We can’t breathe,’’ referring to wildfire smoke that has choked both cities.
Australia is the world’s biggest exporter of coal and liquid natural gas. Australians are also among the highest greenhouse gas emitters per capita.
Thousands of people in the path of the fires have fled to evacuation centres, while some have chosen to ignore evacuation orders and stay to defend their homes.
Evan Harris, who lives in the NSW rural village of Burragate, said police and fire crews told him he should leave his cottage because of the threat. He told them he wasn’t going anywhere.
Harris said he liked to live off the grid in his remote home, which is made from mud bricks. And he felt he had a point to make.
‘‘If this house survives, I think it will be a bit of a wake-up call for people,’’ he said. ‘‘That maybe people should start building like this, instead of over-exorbitant houses.’’
Harris said he was disappointed by environmental destruction, and people should be paying attention to the more sustainable way that indigenous Australians previously lived. ‘‘This is a result of the human species demanding too much of the environment,’’ he said of the fires.
Meanwhile, residents in most of Victoria’s bushfire-stricken areas are welcoming an extended reprieve, after the latest threat appears to have wrought less destruction than feared.
While an emergency warning remains for a fire near Mt Hotham, the state government confirmed that a state of disaster would end at midnight last night.
But authorities have said the danger is far from over as 20 fires continue to burn across the state and 12 watch and act warnings – down from 16 yesterday morning – remain in place.
Even the welcome rain that fell in some areas has brought its own problems, with the risk of flash flooding meaning a new deadly risk for firefighters.
Milder conditions are forecast for the next week to 10 days, meaning attention can turn increasingly to recovery and relieving exhausted emergency services workers.
Firefighters worked through Friday night to contain blazes raging in the alpine and East Gippsland regions. The East Gippsland fire area covers about 900,000ha.
While East Bairnsdale received a rain dump of about 18 millimetres, the town of Mallacoota received only 2mm.
Authorities will spend the next few days trying to open the road into Mallacoota, which has been cut off for a week.
More than 1.3 million ha have been razed since November 21. The fires in Victoria have killed three men, while 286 homes and 400 other buildings have been damaged.