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30 homes lost as fires reach Melbourne
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More than 30 homes have been razed in the worst fire conditions Australia has seen since a 2009 inferno killed 173 people, with flames threatening Melbourne, the country’s second-largest city, officials said yesterday.
Hot, dry winds and soaring temperatures fanned scores of blazes across the southeast on Sunday, with Victoria state sweltering through its worst fire risk weather in five years.
“They were ferocious fires, they ran hard, they hit homes,” said fire commissioner Craig Lapsley.
The emergency came exactly five years after the so-called Black Saturday firestorm devastated the state, flattening whole towns in what was Australia’s deadliest natural disaster of the modern era.
Victoria state premier Dennis Napthine said it had been the worst fire danger day since Black Saturday, with more than 30 homes confirmed lost so far across the state.
“At this stage we have no evidence of loss of life, which is a great effort by the firefighters and all emergency services, and at this stage we have no evidence of serious injury,” Napthine said.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the government stood ready “to do all we reasonably can to ensure that people get the help they need in these difficult, difficult hours and days.”
Hundreds of people spent the night in evacuation shelters after fleeing their homes.
A major open-cut coal mine was ablaze, with a nearby power station in the path of one fire. Napthine said emergency crews were working “very, very hard in that area to protect those strategic assets.”
Six blazes remained at emergency level yesterday, including a 40-kilometer front on the outskirts of Melbourne, with tens of thousands of hectares scorched.
At least 12 of Sunday’s fires were thought by police to have been deliberately lit.
At Warrandyte, on the outskirts of Melbourne, resident Jamie Conlon said he “just sprinted” shirtless and without shoes down his driveway, which was flanked by flames.
“I didn’t stop to look ... I thought I was dead,” he said. “I was just screaming. I was terrified.”
Vast wildfires are common in Australia’s December-February summer months.
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