Janette Lacy is homesick.
For five days the 70-year-old has been cooped up in an evacuation centre in Tara, west of Brisbane.
The last time she saw her Chinchilla home was through a thick cloud of smoke as she, her son and husband fled from fast-approaching flames.
“I must have ingested a really big heap of smoke and I couldn’t breathe,” she told Guardian Australia.
“You could see the orange flames but it was not as scary as the last one in February.”
Lacy had been living in a shipping container after losing everything in a bushfire eight months ago. Lacy, who lives with emphysema, lost her oxygen tanks in the blaze. Her home was uninsured.
Now – for a second time – she doesn’t know what is left of her property.
“This time it’s really got me. I put all my blood, sweat and tears into getting what we had back and it’s going up in smoke as well,” she said.
Lacy moved to Chinchilla three years ago, hoping for a peaceful retirement.
“I wanted the quiet life in my old age out in the country. Fresh air, nice people, small town,” she said.
“[But] ever since we moved here there’s been shootings and fires and floods and more fires. So it wasn’t the ideal lifestyle I was expecting.”
Across Queensland, firefighters have battled more than 420 bushfires this week from Mount Isa to the Western Downs region.
Two people died in the blazes, 280 were evacuated and more than 30 homes have been confirmed destroyed.
More than 11,000 hectares (27,200 acres) were burned in the Tara region alone over four days. Firefighters have been requested from interstate and New Zealand to provide reprieve for fatigued crews.
Authorities issued three more emergency evacuation alerts between midnight and 2am on Saturday, for residents around Tara, Wieambilla and The Gums, as well as Lowmead and Colosseum in central Queensland.
And there is more to come.
The QFES inspector Warren Buckley on Wednesday warned Queenslanders the fire season was only just beginning.
“This is going to go on for a long time,” he said.
“We’re planning for this to go out past through Christmas and into early next year. It’s going to be a long campaign until we get some rain. Please bear with us. We can’t have a fire truck on every corner. But please take care.”
The QFES acting assistant commissioner, Peter Hollier, said strong wind was “the driving factor” causing firefighters “grief”.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, he said the rain washing the state’s south-east was providing little reprieve.
“Five millimetres of rain will be evaporated within 12 to 24 hours,” he said. “It doesn’t do anything to ease the conditions that we’ve got.”
Another 130 blazes burned across New South Wales, including in Bonshaw, where more than 5,000 hectares burned.
Aline Ribeiro, a meteorologist at Weatherzone, said the fire season had started early this year, driven by low rainfall and high temperatures.
“Most of the states, especially in the south-east, have experienced really dry conditions,” she said.
“We expect fire danger to increase on Monday in NSW … And there will be really warm conditions in Queensland over the next days.”
Ribeiro said an El Niño effect will spark hotter temperatures over summer, meaning further fires were likely over the New Year.
After spending three days in a fire evacuation centre in Dalby, Michelle Nolan-Odds returned to her home to find her fridge had broken.
It was the last thing her family of three needed. Nolan-Odds, her fiance and their eight-month-old son had spent days eating take away food while unable to work.
The smoke has now drifted from their property in Weranga, west of Brisbane, but they have no money to repair the fridge and all their food needs to be thrown out.
“During the time we were away a lot of brownouts and blackouts,” Nolan-Odds said.
“Being out of home for three days has caused me to run out of money … There’s a lot of us like this.”
The state’s premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said the government was “pulling out all the stops” to help Queenslanders and confirmed 280 people had been evacuated.
Palaszczuk said some people had been sleeping in sheds because they didn’t want to leave their animals.
“We know that some people have lost everything. Some people who are returning home, it won’t be the home that they left,” she told reporters on Friday.
“Some people have lost their food, other people have lost more personal items. We will be working with them. But also, there has been an outstanding show of support.”
