Australian towns evacuated over Christmas as fires rage

Residents in an Australian region engulfed by bushfires were given two hours to return home to collect their belongings before Christmas on Tuesday, as emergency crews try to contain the blaze.

Communities around the Grampians, in Victoria, have been evacuated amid warnings from authorities that conditions there in the days ahead could be the worst since Australia’s most severe fire season on record, the so-called “Black Summer” of 2019-20.

The bushfires have already burnt over 41,000 hectares (101,000 acres) of land in the past week, however there have been no deaths or loss of property.

Intense heat forecast for Boxing Day has also prompted a string of fire warnings across the country.

accompanied by strong dry winds, while parts of South Australia and New South Wales could also face bushfire conditions on Thursday into Friday.

“We’re expecting to see extreme fire danger across almost the entire state,” Luke Hegarty, a spokesman for Victoria’s State Control Centre, said.

“This is the most significant fire danger that the state has seen – across the whole sections of state that we’re talking about – since Black Summer. It’s important that people understand that Thursday is a day with serious potential,” he added.

Four interstate firefighting forces and two incident management teams – made up of over 100 personnel – will land in Victoria in the coming days to provide reprieve for emergency crews that have been working around the clock to fight the current fires.

The decision to give families around the Grampians temporary access to their homes “to get Christmas items … presents and the like” on Tuesday morning was made by the state’s Country Fire Authority (CFA) chief officer, Jason Heffernan.

“[This is] to ensure if the residents of Halls Gap will be relocated for Christmas, at least they will have what they need,” he told Seven’s Sunrise programme.

Mary Ann Brown, who lives on the southern edge of the Grampians National Park, told the ABC that her community are on edge heading into the holidays.

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

Parts of Australia have been on high alert for bushfire danger this summer, following several quieter seasons compared with the 2019-20 fires which were linked to hundreds of deaths and swept across 24 million hectares of land.

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