{"id":239463,"date":"2026-01-11T12:54:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-11T12:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/239463\/"},"modified":"2026-01-11T12:54:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T12:54:08","slug":"scores-of-homes-razed-one-dead-in-australian-bushfires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/239463\/","title":{"rendered":"Scores of homes razed, one dead in Australian bushfires"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bushfires have razed hundreds of buildings across southeast Australia, authorities said, as they confirmed the first death from the disaster.<\/p>\n

Temperatures soared past 40C as a heatwave blanketed the state of Victoria, sparking dozens of blazes that ripped through more than 300,000 hectares combined.<\/p>\n

Fire crews tallied the damage as conditions eased this morning. A day earlier, authorities had declared a state of disaster.<\/p>\n

Emergency Management Commissioner Tim Wiebusch said over 300 buildings had burned to the ground, a figure that includes sheds and other structures on rural properties.<\/p>\n

More than 70 houses had been destroyed, he said, alongside huge swathes of farming land and native forest.<\/p>\n

“We’re starting to see some of our conditions ease,” he told reporters.<\/p>\n

“And that means firefighters are able to start getting on top of some of the fires that we still have in our landscape,” Mr Wiebusch said.<\/p>\n

Police said one person had died in a bushfire near the town of Longwood, about two hours’ drive north of state capital Melbourne.<\/p>\n

\"This
\nPhotos taken this week showed the night sky glowing orange as the fire near Longwood tore through bushland (Credit: AFP\/CFA Wandong Fire Brigade\/Kylie Shingles)<\/p>\n

“This really takes all the wind out of our sails,” said Chris Hardman from Forest Fire Management Victoria.<\/p>\n

“We really feel for the local community there and the family, friends and loved ones of the person that is deceased,” he told national broadcaster ABC.<\/p>\n

Photos taken this week showed the night sky glowing orange as the fire near Longwood tore through bushland.<\/p>\n

“There were embers falling everywhere. It was terrifying,” cattle farmer Scott Purcell told ABC.<\/p>\n

Another bushfire near the small town of Walwa crackled with lightning as it radiated enough heat to form a localised thunderstorm.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of firefighters from across Australia have been called in to help.<\/p>\n

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was talking with Canada and the United States for possible extra assistance.<\/p>\n

Millions have this week sweltered through a heatwave blanketing much of Australia.<\/p>\n

High temperatures and dry winds combined to form some of the most dangerous bushfire conditions since the “Black Summer” blazes.<\/p>\n

The Black Summer bushfires raged across Australia’s eastern seaboard from late 2019 to early 2020, razing millions of hectares, destroying thousands of homes and blanketing cities in noxious smoke.<\/p>\n

Australia’s climate has warmed by an average of 1.51C since 1910, researchers have found, fuelling increasingly frequent extreme weather patterns over both land and sea.<\/p>\n

Australia remains one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of gas and coal, two key fossil fuels blamed for global heating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bushfires have razed hundreds of buildings across southeast Australia, authorities said, as they confirmed the first death from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239464,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-239463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}