Victoria's bushfire season winds down with unseasonably warm conditions
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Emergency crews in Victoria battled nearly 3,000 scrub and grass fires between November and March but the state has emerged relatively unscathed from the 2016-17 fire season.
However authorities are warning the season is not yet over, with a return to summer conditions forecast for the coming week.
Nearly 30 crews are battling fires about 20 kilometres from the small township of Dargo, in the state's east, which were sparked by lightning.
The fires are in near-inaccessible terrain and, while they are not threatening communities, they remain a concern with unseasonal hot and windy conditions forecast.
During the summer months, milder weather — combined with the use of firefighting aircraft, in many cases as a first response — kept small fires from becoming large fires.
Instead, the state's emergency services were kept busy with shark sightings, heat, flash flooding, storms, thunderstorm asthma, water safety and the Bourke St tragedy.
"It's certainly been a different kind of summer," Victoria's Emergency Management Commissioner Craig Lapsley said.
"The potential was there, but what hasn't panned out this year is we haven't had the extreme days, and that's the difference — the weather effects have been milder through the season."
The previous summer season was headlined by several large fires, including the 2015 Christmas Day fires which destroyed 116 houses in Wye River and Separation Creek on the Great Ocean Road.
Those fires burnt for more than a month across thousands of hectares of inaccessible land in the Otway Ranges.
With favourable conditions, Forest Fire Management Victoria has carried out a planned burn in the rugged land adjacent to where the fires roared through the coastal townships 15 months ago.
The 304-hectare burn between the towns of Wye River and Kennett River had been more than five years in the planning, with helicopters being used to ignite areas within the burn that crews could not access.
Forest Fire Management team leader Brooke Bailey said the burn was conducted to protect the communities along the coast, despite the obvious concern of residents seeing smoke on the horizon once again.
"For the communities here at the moment, obviously after the Wye River fire, there's a real heightened sense of wanting to know what's going on," she said.
"Coming to get this planned burn done today means a great deal to all of us who live and work in this community — it's been five years of planning, preparation and re-preparing because we have to make sure we get the right window of opportunity with the weather to actually conduct the burn."
Mr Lapsley said the warm start to autumn was challenging for authorities conducting planned burns around the state.
"We've just got to be really careful about where we put those fires, but those planned burns are really important for the protection of Victoria and it is the right thing to do in March and April," he said.
This season emergency services adopted a new strategy of dispatching firefighting aircraft in conjunction with the first response ground crews to minimise the impact of fires.
"We've got aircraft responding at exactly the same time as fire trucks and that is something that we believe has proved exceptional in the sense that we've got small fires being retained as small fires," Mr Lapsley said.
Topics: fires, disasters-and-accidents, bushfire, emergency-incidents, kennett-river-3221, wye-river-3221
