A RESIDENT of an Australian town ravaged by fire has said that prayer saved the community from disaster.
David Jeffrey, of Mallacoota, Victoria, said on Tuesday that the town had been saved “due to mainly wind, and a lot of prayer”. Speaking to the BBC, he said that the residents had been pushed to the beach and were readying themselves to go into the sea as the fire approached.
Mr Jeffrey said: “I can tell you, we were praying like crazy, and we certainly had some answer to our prayer.”
The town of about 1000 people had been woken by emergency sirens telling them to go to the beach. “We were bracing for the worst because it was black,” Mr Jeffrey told the BBC. “Like it should have been daylight, and it was black like midnight. And we could hear the fire roaring.”
He continued: “I said, Lord, please you’ve got to stop it, you’ve got to do something, and I prayed ‘God, you’ve got to do something’ . . . I know there was a few Christians there praying.”
The fire turned back, but, Mr Jeffrey said, “if the wind had hit 20 minutes earlier, we would have been gone.”
There have been more than a dozen “emergency blazes” across the states of Victoria and New South Wales (NSW), killing at least 12 people. More than 200,000 hectares of lands have burned in Victoria. The NSW Rural Fire Service commissioner, Shane Fitzsimmons, said that it was “absolutely” the state’s worst bushfire season on record.
Military aircraft and vessels have been deployed to help those affected by the fire.