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On January 8, 2026, Victorian authorities warned of a catastrophic fire rating. In Castlemaine, communication failures during the blaze left residents isolated.
On January 8, 2026, Victorian authorities began warning that a catastrophic fire rating had been declared for the following day, with conditions expected to be the most dangerous experienced this summer, according to the Country Fire Authority. In Castlemaine, a town of around 7,000 people, resident Fiannuala Morgan was encouraging her parents to leave their property in the bone dry, flinty hills outside of town. She would be staying in Castlemaine, a town etched out of goldrush-era buildings and wide, sleepy streets. By 9 o'clock the following morning, it was 31 degrees.
Fiannuala was aware of the catastrophic rating but did not have an integrated sense of what it meant. When the fire started, it went from zero to 100 in seconds. A ferocious hot wind arrived, as if the door of a giant oven had burst open. The power went out. The emergency app on her phone lit up, showing multiple fires had started. Then her phone stopped working, but not completely. The first thing that happened was her emergency app froze. She tried to call her mother but could not get through. She tried to send a text to either her mother or her father, and that did not work either.
Fire Threatens Harcourt and Castlemaine
A few kilometres away, a grass fire was racing through paddocks towards the nearby orchard town of Harcourt, known for its juicy apples. Fiannuala knew about the fire because she was able to call her brother in Melbourne, even though other calls were failing. He updated her about what was happening on the VicEmergency app. At some point, Fiannuala left her house and walked up a nearby hill to try to get reception. From the hill she watched as a thick cloud of smoke turned the blue sky an ominous shade of orange. Her brother told her the wind was pushing the fire towards Castlemaine.
She had always thought that Castlemaine was a very safe place if there was a fire, but suddenly realised that there was nowhere in these conditions that was safe. Back at home, Fiannuala put her Persian cat in the bath because the air conditioning had dropped out along with the power. The blackout had also rendered the NBN. She did not have a backup battery-powered radio, so she turned on her car radio to listen to the ABC's emergency broadcast. But by that point, the broadcasting tower at Mount Alexander had burned.
Alone, and with dwindling access to information, she decided to find her parents who were now sheltering at a friend's house nearby. It was not responsible of her to go, she says. There were no traffic lights and people were driving erratically. Fiannuala found that her parents had patchy mobile phone signals and could not access the emergency apps either. Sometimes you could use your phone and sometimes you could not, she says.
Communication Breakdown in Regional Victoria
As the afternoon progressed, emergency warnings to shelter indoors now were being issued for nearby Harcourt. The fast-moving grassfire would eventually destroy 66 dwellings. The only certainty was that there was not any. Some houses and businesses were mangled, blackened wrecks, others stood undamaged beside them. Lives were up-ended. But a wind change turned the flames away from the larger town of Castlemaine.
For Fiannuala, a lecturer in publishing and communications at the University of Melbourne, the day brought a completely new awareness of risk. She has channelled the experience into understanding why multiple forms of communication failed and what that means for regional communities in Australia facing increasingly severe natural disasters in an era of climate crisis. Recent changes, like the rollout of the NBN, the retirement of copper-wire landlines, and the shutdown of the 3G network, have left communities like Castlemaine dangerously unaware of the fragility of the communication systems they should be able to rely on in an emergency. There is every chance that the next time this happens the outcome could be fatal. In her mind's eye, Fiannuala sees a woman behind the wheel, without access to information, making the ruinous decision to drive into an inferno. After the Black Summer fires in 2019-20, a report meticulously dissected the ways telecommunications failed, mostly due to power outages, and how communities were left without access to crucial emergency information, unable to contact each other or emergency services, or access money to purchase supplies. The report stressed that resilient telecommunication networks were lifesaving, and that more needed to be done to bolster them in the bush.
New Leadership for Telecommunications Resilience
Into this mess walked Vince Di Pietro, a former naval aviator and commander of the fleet air arm and ex-chief executive of Lockheed Martin Australia. His appointment signals a renewed focus on addressing the vulnerabilities exposed during the Castlemaine fire and previous disasters. The incident on January 8-9, 2026, serves as a stark reminder of the critical need for robust communication infrastructure in regional Australia, as climate change intensifies fire risks.
Castlemaine Fire Communication Failure Victoria Bushfire Fiannuala Morgan Vince Di Pietro NBN 3G Shutdown
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