00:00We do have 10 fires still burning across the state in various degrees, so we still have
00:10hot, dry conditions, and some of these fires may burn for days, even weeks, due to the
00:16inaccessible country and the access for firefighters to get in. So we will use aircraft for these,
00:21but we will still see these fires burning. We have had floods and some rain in Victoria
00:28over the past week. Has that been helping firefighting efforts?
00:33Unfortunately, not as much as we would like. We have seen scattered rainfall across the state.
00:38Some have eased conditions. We have had some rainfall drop over the top of some of these fires,
00:44some around the edge, 5 to 10 mil on some, which have eased some of the conditions and slowed the
00:50fire spread, but not extinguished it. Obviously, we got a lot of rain down the Great Ocean Road
00:57and firefighters and SES volunteers and crews are still dealing with the recovery and the relief
01:04activities down there from that flash flood event as well.
01:07One concern we were speaking about last weekend was that the rain would provide some reprieve,
01:13but then we're expecting the hot conditions to return again. And it was urgent that firefighters
01:19needed to get the blazers under control before the conditions heated up again. Is that looking
01:24like that? Yeah, crews are working extremely hard at the moment to contain these fires. As I said,
01:33these are large fires with 411,000 hectares of burnt out country. So crews have got a task ahead
01:40of them. While they've eased those conditions, we're seeing low to moderate fire activity this week.
01:49So we do have that ease of weather conditions while we'll hopefully get on top. But we still have
01:55hot, dry conditions across the state. We're still going to see some spike days. The northwest of the
02:01country hasn't really received any rain. So we still are saying to communities, you know, be vigilant.
02:08The fire season isn't over yet.
02:10Can you give us a sense of the destruction that these fires caused, Michelle?
02:14Yeah, unfortunately, one life has been lost during this fire season. We've seen about 411,000
02:22hectares of country burnt out. More than 1000 structures have been lost. It's estimated over
02:3020,000 stock have been lost. And these numbers may still increase. So this is, you know, we're still
02:38doing impact assessments. We still have crews on the ground. We still have, you know, community members
02:43coming forward as they can get back access to their properties. So that, you know, still may
02:49increase, hopefully not. And we still got those fires burning. So we still need to stay on top of
02:56this. Yeah, incredibly destructive fires. We've had them in Victoria. What are you expecting for the rest
03:02of the season? What is it? What's this sort of signal for the rest of the bushfire season?
03:06Look, it's not over yet. We still have, we've started off from a really dry, hot spot. You know,
03:14the underlying moisture in the ground isn't there. So while we have the next week is low to moderate
03:22fire danger, we are going to see some spike days into the coming month. We'll continue to monitor that
03:30and we'll continue to, you know, send out those messages when we do see any changes. At the moment,
03:37I think the next week is about consolidation and trying to get control of these fire lines for us.
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