Catastrophe In Victoria

These Australian fires look like the Apocalypse come alive! The mounting death toll (131 and climbing) can only have risen so high if people are getting surprised by the speed of the fire. Indeed, they say the Kinglake fire complex has a 100 km long front (interactive map), which means it's damned hard to escape if you don't have at least an hour's notice:

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd said arsonists in Victoria had committed mass murder as the death toll in Australia's worst ever bushfires rose to 131 this afternoon, with the final toll expected to be much more.

Authorities are being warned that the toll could climb to 230, The Australian quoted sources inside state emergency meetings as saying.

The public response to the catastrophe has been immediate, with thousands of people donating millions of dollars to the official Red Cross relief fund. Concerned friends and relatives have also used the Herald Sun bushfire message board to post pleas for information on loved ones.

Thirty-one fires are still burning out of control across the state. Dozens of communities in Gippsland, including Churchill, have been put on bushfire alert. Towns at risk in the northeast Victoria include Beechworth, Yackandandah and Toolangai.

Amid speculation some of the fires were deliberately lit - and with reports yesterday that people were returning to relight blazes after fire crews had left an area - Mr Rudd said: "There are no words to describe it other than mass murder."

At least 750 homes have been destroyed and 3733 people have registered with the Red Cross after evacuating their properties. The number left homeless is expected to be far higher, the Red Cross said.

It was confirmed that at least four children have died, but that figure would also be expected to rise as full details emerged.

A two-year-old girl was among 13 in intensive care in hospital. Twenty-two people with shocking burns were admitted to the Alfred hospital, the state's main trauma centre, where staff ran out of morphine trying to ease patients' pain.

Most of the damage was done by two massive fires - one that virtually wiped out towns northeast of Melbourne including Kinglake and Marysville with a 100km front - and a second inferno that raced across Gippsland. At least 33 people were killed in Kinglake alone.

...Six victims were in one car trying to outrun the inferno which swept through Kinglake in minutes. A resident said the town was littered with burnt-out cars and he believed many contained bodies.

"It's going to look like Hiroshima, I tell you, it's going to look like a nuclear bomb," he told Melbourne's Herald Sun.

His daughter told of another resident who "went to put his kids in the car, put them in, turned around to go grab something from the house, then his car was on fire with his kids in it, and they burnt".

Among the survivors, families sat in dazed disbelief, surrounded by mattresses, dogs and whatever meagre possessions they managed to gather as they fled the fires.

Some talked of friends who had lost children, brothers and sisters, kids who have lost best friends and of a woman who has not seen her husband since Saturday. They said they had no warning before daylight turned to night and their communities were enveloped in a wall of fire and smoke.

"We looked over and there was a wall of flames looking at us and everything went pitch black. There was no warning," Joanne Fisher of Kinglake said. "I've never seen anything like it in my life ... You see this on TV, it doesn't happen to you."

It was believed the fire in Bendigo was caused by a cigarette, but Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon said she was sickened by the fact some other fires might have been deliberately lit.

"It makes me very angry ... to then have someone who may have lit these fires. Fires are so devastating. The injuries we are seeing. We are talking about a massive death toll."