State emergency services warn Victorians to remain vigilant as fire season continues

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Despite the fire threat decreasing significantly this week, there are still fires in Victoria which are not under control. State response controller Michelle Cowling says residents need to stay vigilant throughout the rest of summer.

Transcript

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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