Bushfires have razed hundreds of buildings across southeast Australia, authorities said on Sunday, as they confirmed the first death from the disaster.
Temperatures soared past 40 degree Celsius as a heat wave blanketed the state of Victoria, sparking dozens of blazes that ripped through more than 300,000 hectares combined.
Fire crews tallied the damage as conditions eased on Jan. 11. A day earlier, authorities had declared a state of disaster.
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.
More than 70 houses had been destroyed, he said, alongside huge swathes of farming land and native forest.
Police said one person had died in a bushfire near the town of Longwood, about two hours' drive north of state capital Melbourne.
Another bushfire near the small town of Walwa crackled with lightning as it radiated enough heat to form a localised thunderstorm.
High temperatures and dry winds combined to form some of the most dangerous bushfire conditions since the "Black Summer" blazes.
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.
Australia's climate has warmed by an average of 1.51 degree Celsius since 1910, researchers have found, fueling increasingly frequent extreme weather patterns over both land and sea.
