New satellite images captured by Japan’s Himawari weather satellite and European Sentinel‑2 data have revealed the full extent of Victoria’s bushfire emergency, which earlier this month saw more than 400,000 hectares burnt and major losses recorded during a week of extreme heat and violent winds.
The images – covered by the ABC late last week – show the exact time when fires erupted across the state on January 5th, where more than 100 separate fires were recorded by Victorian emergency authorities. Several of the largest fires, including the Longwood and Walwa blazes, scorched more than 100,000 hectares of predominantly grassland.
Last week, Wood Central revealed that the state’s timber plantations were not spared by the disaster, with more than 10,000 hectares of commercial timber — including pine, blue gum and mixed‑species — tied up in major fires near Longwood, Walwa, Colac and the Otways, as well as across mixed‑species estates in the Hume region. Whilst on Thursday, Andrew White, CEO of the Victorian Forest Products Association (VFPA), warned that significant damage had been recorded across parts of the state’s plantation estate, particularly softwood plantations in the northeast, impacting mills, pulp producers and engineered‑wood manufacturers.
According to Professor David Bowman, a leading pyrogeographer from the University of Tasmania, the pattern of fire spread marks a stark departure from the Black Summer disaster. “This is a different scenario than the previous fire disaster we had in 2019‑20 when the eucalypt forests were bone dry, and they were the things burning, and there wasn’t a lot of fuel in the rural landscape because it’d been a prolonged drought,” he said.
Instead, Bowman said the current emergency reflects a landscape primed by several wet years. “This seems to be, at the moment, more of a grassland story right now, where the rural lands are burning because we’ve had good wet years.”
Bowman, who reviewed hundreds of satellite sequences, said the Longwood fire in particular showed “long tentacles of fire” — a signature of fast‑moving grassland burns driven by powerful winds. Wind gusts above 110 kilometres per hour were recorded in western Victoria on January 9, the same day temperatures exceeded 40°C for the third consecutive day in many regions.
Meanwhile, Professor Jason Sharples, a bushfire expert at the University of NSW, said the Walwa fire was intense enough to generate pyrocumulus and later pyrocumulonimbus clouds — towering columns capable of producing lightning and erratic, self‑generated weather. As conditions deteriorated, smoke plumes from Walwa, Longwood, the Big Desert Wilderness Park and the Otways merged into a statewide haze, with ash blanketing Melbourne by Friday evening.
Additional fires ignited near Mount Darling in the Alpine National Park and around Harcourt in central Victoria. By Sunday, temperatures eased, and winds dropped, allowing crews to make progress, although emergency warnings remained in place across several regions.
But even as warnings were downgraded last Tuesday, Bowman warned that the danger is far from over. The rapid grassland burns, he said, were extremely challenging for firefighters: “You can’t fight these things in the same way you fight a forest fire because they’re travelling so quickly with high winds. Everything you’re trying to do is being controlled by the wind,” he said.
With heatwave conditions forecast to continue for several weeks, Bowman warned that Victoria’s eucalypt forests — still relatively moist — could dry out in the coming weeks. “If heatwave conditions continued in Victoria, the eucalyptus forests would dry out and could potentially ignite in February or March. That’s what I would be worrying about,” he said.
As for the full extent of plantation losses, White warns that it will still take weeks to assess: “These plantations support the manufacture of paper and packaging, and structural timber products used in framing, trusses and other core components of homes and are a critical part of Victoria’s housing supply chain,” White explained. Nonetheless, he said, Victoria’s plantation sector is resilient and well‑established, with industry working closely across the supply chain to manage the impacts of the fires while continuing to support housing delivery.
