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31 December, 2019
By SJA Jafri
SYDNEY/ MELBOURNE: Thousands of people have fled into the water at a beachside town in Australia to seek shelter from a massive bushfire bearing down on the area.
Residents said the blaze moved into the Victorian town of Mallacoota on Tuesday morning, throwing embers towards homes.
Online, people posted pictures of a deep-red sky and reported “complete darkness” and choking smoke.
Several popular holiday spots along the coast between Sydney and Melbourne are currently under threat from bushfires.
The most serious “emergency-level” blazes span a 500km (310 miles) stretch from Batemans Bay in New South Wales to Bairnsdale in Victoria.
Residents in other beachside communities, including Bermagui in New South Wales, were also reported to have sought shelter in the water, local media reported.
Authorities have told people in these regions – many of them tourists – to stay put because it is too late and dangerous to evacuate.
The major highway in the region has also been closed off.
Victoria’s Premier Daniel Andrews said authorities held concerns for four people missing in the region.
“We do have real fears for their safety. They’ve been in active fire environments and we can’t account for them,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
“Mallacoota is currently under attack at the moment,” said Victoria’s state emergency commissioner Andrew Crisp on Tuesday. He reported there were “4,000 people on the beach”.
“It is pitch-black, it is quite scary… the community right now is under threat but we will hold our line and they will be saved and protected.”
On social media, locals reported they had boarded small boats in the water, or had huddled in their fortified homes as the fire swept through the town.
Crews are fighting to protect lives rather than buildings, locals said. Several homes in the town are already believed to have been destroyed.
Crisp said there had been “significant property losses” across the entire East Gippsland region in the past days.
Searing mid-40Cs heat combined with strong winds and lightning had triggered more than 200 new fires across the state in the past 24 hours.
They have fuelled the rapid expansion of existing fronts, with several blazes so large they are generating their own thunderstorms and lightning.
It is another escalation in the nation’s bushfire crisis which has seen hundreds of massive blazes destroy millions of hectares in the eastern states since September.
At least 10 people have died, among them civilians and three volunteer firefighters.
