‘Too late to leave’: Australian Bushfires out of control
On the outskirts of Adaminaby, a village of about 300 people in the Snowy Mountains in southern NSW, an acrid smoke turned the sky black by mid-afternoon and mud, dirt and ash rained from the sky while a small crew of volunteer firefighters fought two blazes approaching the town from the north and west.
Glen Squire, the captain of the local Rural Fire Service brigade, told the Guardian his small crew of volunteers had been working for weeks to protect the town. But properties further into a dense forest of mountain ash trees were “undefendable”. The compulsory call-up of army reserve troops to help bushfire-hit towns across the country survive the ongoing bushfire crisis and recover from its impacts is the first in Australia’s history. Soldiers will provide “civil aid, humanitarian assistance, medical or civil emergency or disaster relief”, the defence minister said in her order to troops.
“We are in for a long night and we are still to hit the worst of it,” the NSW premier said at an afternoon briefing. “It’s a very volatile situation.” Residents used social media to post photos of the sky turning black and red from the smoke and the glare of the fires, including in the Victorian town of Mallacoota, where around 1,000 people were evacuated by sea on Friday.
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