Surrounded by hills burned black as soot, with homes flattened and cattle decimated, Australians in the country’s east on Friday confronted a new round of supercharged bush fires as high winds drove the fires back toward towns that had already burned at least once before.
Areas of Victoria State and South Australia were under evacuation orders. In Batlow, an apple-growing town in New South Wales that barely survived a day of 50-foot flames last Saturday, residents who had only just been allowed to return scrambled to figure out what was lost and how to protect what remained. “It’s like the fire is a sentient being,” said Sulari Gentill, a novelist with a husband and a son who are volunteer firefighters in Batlow. “It feels like it’s coming to get us.”
The sheer relentlessness of the fires — which have burned more than 15 million acres, killed at least 24 people and destroyed about 2,000 homes — is increasingly pushing Australia beyond crisis mode into a jumble of contemplation, anger and traumatized fatigue. This is especially true in the dozens of places enduring repeated threats, where firefighters and beleaguered residents are caught in a smoky, delirious in-between.