Residents in Australia’s Victoria state were told to flee on Saturday after an out-of-control bushfire tore through steep, forested country.
The blaze began on Thursday night near Gaffneys Creek, located about 50 km northeast of state capital Melbourne.
Victorian emergency services issued the state’s highest alert for residents around the A1 Mine Settlement after the fire moved rapidly along ridgelines, leading to road closures.
“Leaving immediately is the safest option, before conditions become too dangerous,” Victoria Emergency said on its website.
State response controller Alistair Drayton told ABC News that the bushfire was burning in “remote mountainous terrain which is difficult for crews to access from the ground”.
Firefighters had managed to contain the fire’s western edge, but they were still working round-the-clock to bring it under control.
“The fire is burning in complex and steep terrain, with crews working around the clock. They are using heavy machinery to build containment lines on the ground and aircraft to directly attack the blaze,” officials said, according to Sky News.
Police are also investigating whether the bushfire was deliberately lit. A local volunteer told ABC News that crews who initially responded believed it may have been deliberately ignited after they found three separate ignition points.
Victoria Police said detectives from the Benalla Crime Investigation Unit were leading the inquiry. “While the cause of the blaze remains under investigation, the fire is being treated as suspicious until known otherwise,” police said.
About 35 vehicles were responding to the blaze, which authorities said had burnt through more than 600 hectares.
Drayton also flagged that weather expectations added to the urgency of the warning. “There is a significant amount of rain coming across Victoria [tomorrow] which is very welcome but the way in which it will be coming, unfortunately, with thunderstorms, people do need to be quite cautious in relation to their travel,” he told the outlet.
Authorities have said that temperatures across Victoria are set to hit 38C in the north, 32C in the south, and high 20s near the coast on Saturday. Sunday will see “gusty winds and moderate to locally heavy rainfall,” which has a danger of fanning the fire and flash flooding respectively.
Daryl Bashmore, owner of the Kevington Hotel and a volunteer firefighter, said that the fire’s direction was a concern, even if it wasn’t moving too quickly.
“It just depends if that wind does pick up and pushes it further this way or turns around,” he said.
Victoria Emergency said that three other active fires in the state were at the “Watch and Act” level, the second-highest alert tier used when conditions remain dangerous but immediate evacuation is not yet ordered.
This bushfire follows a severe outbreak in January, when thousands of firefighters were mobilised across south-eastern Australia to combat dozens of blazes that collectively razed homes, cut power to large numbers of properties, and charred vast tracts of bushland. They were the worst fires to hit the southeast since the Black Summer blazes of 2019-2020 that destroyed an area the size of Turkey and killed 33 people.
