2006-07 Australian bushfire season

2006–07 Australian bushfire season
Satellite image of smoke from fires in the Victorian Alps and Gippsland, 8 December 2006
Location	Australia
Statistics
Date(s)	Winter 2006 – autumn 2007 (southern hemisphere)
Burned area	>1,360,000 ha (3,400,000 acres)
Cause	Various
Buildings destroyed	100+ total — 83 houses — Numerous non-residential structures
Injuries	1,400
Fatalities	5 total — 4 civilians — 1 Forestry Tasmania employee
Season
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The 2006–07 Australian bushfire season was one of the most extensive bushfire seasons in Australia's history. Victoria experienced the longest continuously burning bushfire complex in Australia's history, with fires in the Victorian Alps and Gippsland burning over 1 million hectares of land over the course of 69 days. See Bushfires in Australia for an explanation of regional seasons.

The 2006–07 season included the Victorian Alpine Fire Complex which was the longest running collection of bushfires in Victoria's history. On 1 December 2006, more than 70 fires were caused by lightning strikes in the Victorian Alps, many of which eventually merged to become the Great Divide Complex, which burned for 69 days across about a million hectares.

Despite the length of the season and amount of land burnt, the fires were contained to mostly unoccupied regions such as the Victorian Alps, national parks and remnant bushland. Evacuation plans were implemented in many small towns in these areas, a combination of these factors resulted in only one fatality as a result of the fires.

Three deaths and multimillion-dollar livestock and property losses in ten days of bushfires in Victoria. Fires occurred in the Stawell (Deep Lead) area in early January, and in the Yea, Moondarra, Grampians, Kinglake and Anakie regions in mid-late January.

On 24 September 2006, bushfires began burning in various places in the Southern Highlands, Shoalhaven, Hawkesbury River and Hunter regions of New South Wales, Australia.