An out-of-control bushfire has demolished a central Victorian town, leaving three people missing, surrounded the popular tourist town of Alexandra and prompted evacuation warnings in Marysville on Friday night, as hundreds of firefighters battled two major fires and dozens of smaller blazes across the state.
This week, authorities repeatedly warned of dire conditions – the worst across Victoria since the 2019-20 Black Summer – and by midday on Friday conditions were worse than expected, with at least 60 new fires burning across the state, fuelled by extreme heat and dry conditions. Dozens of homes have been lost.
Wyatt Moncrieff at their property near Longwood East. The fire came right to their back door, and their neighbour’s house burnt down. Credit: Jason South
Fire grounds baked in extreme heat, bushfires generating their own lightning, strong winds threatening to keep firefighting aircraft grounded, and the 8pm weather change – the most dangerous part of fighting a bushfire – brought more danger in central Victoria.
Temperatures plummeted 15 degrees with the change, but the few hours that followed the wind change over fire grounds would be “crucial”, senior meteorologist Angus Hines said.
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“Those fires start to blow in a new path, and also, because those wind changes can be really quite blustery and gusty and not really consistent, it can really make for quite erratic fire behaviour,” Hines said.
“The first half of the day tomorrow will be a pretty key time to see if those fires do flare up again, or if they’re able to be a little bit more contained than they were today.”
Winds were expected to drop off overnight after a day of gusts up to 100km/h.
“Overall, that will act to suppress the fire danger across the state from overnight tonight into the weekend, but in the short term – the next few hours, as that wind changes, and that wind surges quite strongly for a couple of hours – it’s continuing to be really challenging,” Hines said.
By Saturday, winds would be calmer in Victoria’s north, but still blustery across the
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