Another Australian summer, another spate of catastrophic wildfires. As DW's Stuart Braun watched the flames rip through Victoria in recent days, he says locals are getting out while they can.
It was 1 a.m. and I struggled to sleep as wind blasted through the forest canopy and the smell of smoke hung in the air from distant fires.
Pastures and bushland were fuelling a widening fire-front about 90 kilometers to the north of our mountain home on the edge of Melbourne. In between, endless valleys of fire-prone Eucalyptus forest, dried out over hot summer weeks, were a tinderbox ready to explode.
I'm lucky to live in one of the most beautiful places on earth. But with just a single road out, it can also be very dangerous.
Earlier that evening I had texted a friend whose family owned a large property in the growing fire zone. All but his brother had evacuated, and he was hoping for a change in wind direction.
"Definitely leave," he wrote when I said my family and I were planning to get out the following m
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