One community has been cut off by bushfire and told to seek shelter and six other towns are packing up valuables and evacuating their homes as fires continue to rage in central Queensland.
Firefighters can’t stop the fire advancing towards the seaside hamlet of Tinnanbar, which is between Maryborough and Gympie, and say the blaze has reached the road.
“Tinnanbar Road is being impacted by fire and is unsafe. The safest option is to shelter in place,” authorities warn.
Six other communities are evacuating, two not far from Baffle Creek, the epicentre of the state’s bushfire crisis.
People have been told to leave Winfield and Captain Creek, as well as Stanwell and Kabra, near Rockhampton. The Caves, about 25km north of Rockhampton, has also been told to evacuate.
Fires were being fanned by a cocktail of high-winds, record-breaking temperatures and unusually low humidity.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has flown to the fire zone, and ironically had not long left Kabra when an alert was issued for residents to leave.
At least one home was destroyed at Kabra on Wednesday.
Palaszczuk has spent the day warning Queenslanders that the fire crisis is not over, despite a slight easing of conditions.
“We’re not out of this yet,” she said, as more than 100 fires continued to burn across the state.
Stephen Dailey spent all of Wednesday afternoon watching the fire creep closer to his hilltop home at Kabra. But when something “close to a fireball” erupted, he decided it might be time to move.
Dailey and his wife are now in a cottage a short stroll from where their central Queensland home stood before it was consumed by flames.
“I was sitting out there watching it all afternoon because you could see it out there, you could see the smoke,” he said near the ruins of his home.
“The wind was coming from the south, then it was going north, then it’d go south and back north, so I thought ‘I’ll hook a few things up.”
He hooked up his boat and caravan and drove them a few hundred metres down the hill to his daughter’s place from where he watched the fire claim his house.
“I won’t say a fireball, but it was pretty close to a fireball coming at me,” he said.
“We were lucky to get out.”
The family home with wraparound verandahs and unrivalled views of the valley is now a pile of burnt metal, crumbled terracotta pots and reminders of what lay before.
“We used to walk out in the night and you could see all of Rockhampton,” he said.
Dailey and his wife Fiona count themselves as fortunate.
“No one died,” he said.
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, has pledged federal help for the state’s bushfire emergency, activating the commonwealth disaster assistance plan to allow the Queensland government to seek federal help as well as financial assistance.
Despite the success in preventing damage at Gracemere, the Bruce Highway at Mount Larcom, inland from Gladstone, remained cut as crews assessed a stretch of the route amid fears burnt trees could fall on to cars.
The stench of smoke hung thick in the air on Thursday as local residents Jeanette and Nick Schwindt stood over pools of melted plastic that held thousands of gallons of water the day before.
In every direction remnants of machinery, trailers, wood stocks and equipment lay smouldering after fire tore through their Mount Larcom property on Wednesday.
They consider themselves extremely lucky.
“We are just so relieved the house is here,” Jeanette Schwindt told the Australian Associated Press.
From their hilltop home on the tiny town’s fringe, they could see how close they came to losing it all.
Scorched earth surrounded the homes of their neighbours who lost cars, sheds and other outbuildings.
“We haven’t had a fire like this, I don’t think, ever,” Schwindt said.
“Within an hour it was here.”
Fears that the town of Gracemere would be engulfed were allayed on Thursday morning, after firefighters managed to stop a fast-moving fire heading towards the community.
At 5.30am local time, an evacuation order for Gracemere was lifted. About 8,000 residents, who had fled to nearby Rockhampton and spent the night at the local showground, were being allowed to return.
Overnight immediate concern shifted further north, to two communities near Mackay. Residents at Sarina Beach and Campwin Beach were woken in the middle of the night by texts and calls from emergency services, advising them to leave as a fast-moving fire approached.
Palaszczuk, said Gracemere had been “saved”.
“I want to thank all of the people involved with the aerial bombing overnight, all of the firefighters on the ground,” Palaszczuk said.
“That town was in the direct line of fire and it is amazing to think that that town is completely saved.”
“In Victoria we used to see a fire level danger of 100 and if it was over 100 it was deemed to be catastrophic and in that Rockhampton central region yesterday it was 135 and in Emerald it was 105,” she said.
The Queensland Fire and Emergency Services assistant commissioner Gary McCormack said the main area of concern was from central Queensland north to Townsville.
“These conditions are not over with yet,” he told the Nine Network. “Certainly we are looking at this into the weekend.”
Authorities still don’t know exactly how many homes have been lost since the crisis began last weekend. But some were lost in the first major blaze, around Deepwater national park, halfway between Bundaberg and Gladstone, and at Finch Hatton, west of Mackay.
Morrison begged people to heed evacuation orders. “You can rebuild a home, but you can’t rebuild a family,” he said.
More than 40 schools in central Queensland remained closed on Thursday.
