00:00So around 5pm yesterday, we got a fire start on the Murray River Road here.
00:08So if we put it into perspective, we're here at Walwa at the moment
00:13and the fire's over here in Thalagalong.
00:19How many k's is that?
00:20It's about 20, 25 k's, yeah.
00:24So about 5pm, both CFA, FFM, Vic turned out to a fire there.
00:30Given the terrain here, it's extremely steep.
00:33It's inaccessible by vehicles or by heavy plant
00:36and it ran straight up the slopes and grew to around 300 hectares by yesterday afternoon.
00:45We did throw quite a lot of aircraft on this.
00:48So we had three water bombing aircraft filled with retardant.
00:52We had the large air tankers from Avalon
00:54and we also had a rotary helicopter as well as support aircraft as well.
01:00During the night, it did continue to burn but not overly hard for us
01:04but we did see continued fire behaviour through the night
01:07which gives us an idea of how dry things are up along the river country here
01:10and also about what the conditions are doing overnight.
01:14We are getting dry nights, not a lot of fuel recovery, fuel moisture recovery.
01:19So we did see a little bit but it didn't grow too much.
01:21It's still only around 305, 310 hectares at the moment.
01:29And we've still got today considerable number of appliances on here.
01:34Both FFM, Vic, CFA are on here.
01:37We've still got the same water bombing aircraft and the large air tankers on here.
01:41Plus we're also looking at some night time water bombing on this as well.
01:46The idea of that is to try and slow the spread of here.
01:51We can't actually get in here with our heavy plant, our bulldozers and our harvesters
01:56to actually put a mineral earth line around it.
01:59It's just too steep and it's just too rocky.
02:03So that's what we know.
02:05That's the current situation at the moment.
02:07The sort of bits that we don't know or that we are continuing to monitor is the next few days.
02:14So obviously people have heard about we're going into a severe heat wave.
02:18It's probably, well it is, it's the hottest heat wave and longest heat wave we've seen since the 2019-2020.
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