Christmas night cool change for Victoria may quell state's bushfires
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Version 0 of 1. Forecasters in the Melbourne office of the Bureau of Meteorology are hoping for just enough rain over Christmas night to quell several bushfires still burning around Victoria but not enough to wash out the Boxing Day Test at the Melbourne cricket ground. Fire conditions are expected to worsen on Christmas Day as the temperature picks up to 33C in Melbourne and up to 36C in the north-east of the state, where the 9,000ha Barnawartha fire is still burning. Andrew Graystone, spokesman for the Country Fire Authority (CFA) state control centre, said the fire danger rating for most of the state on Friday would be very high, pushing into severe in some areas. It has been downgraded from earlier forecasts because of the timing of a cool change, which is expected to move through the state on Friday night. “If the models stay the way we are going, we might manage to pull it off; we could get a good 20–30mm of rain over the fires and dry out in time for the cricket,” said Stephen King, senior BoM forecaster. Graystone said firefighters would spend the next three days strengthening control lines around the 17 bushfires still active around Victoria to ensure they did not break containment lines on Christmas Day. Sixteen houses were destroyed in fires at Barnawartha and at Scotsburn, near Ballarat, at the weekend. The CFA has confirmed stock losses of 1,000 sheep and five horses in the Scotsburn fire, and the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, said he expected stock losses to be “significant” at Barnawartha near Albury-Wodonga on the Victoria/NSW border. Graystone said the main area of concern going into Christmas was the south-eastern edge of the Barnawartha fire, which burnt into the dry, wooded box-ironbark gullies near the towns of Chiltern and Yackandandah, including in the Mount Pilot national park. “There are still some areas that are causing a few problems with control,” Graystone said. “Our focus really is about blacking out and getting good security on the edge of the fire and the containment lines that we have got.” A 92ha fire burning in the Otways 150km south-west of Melbourne, near Wye river and the paddocks which are used to host the Falls music and arts festival, could also prove a problem. The fire is one of two, burning close together, that started after a lightning strike on Saturday. “It is a priority to get this fire controlled prior to Christmas,” Grayston said. “There’s obviously going to be a large influx of tourists and visitors into that part of the world between Christmas and the new year.” About 16,000 of those visitors will be heading to Falls festival, which begins on 28 December and runs until 1 January. |