Twenty two households in Albert Town were told to get out of their homes on Saturday night as a vegetation fire ran roughly a kilometre through trees and scrub on the steep ground behind their back fences, with flames that residents put at 20 metres high.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand was called to Lagoon Avenue, on the edge of the Clutha River just north of Wānaka, at 7.28pm. Eight pumping appliances and three support vehicles were sent, with crews coming from Wānaka, Luggate, Lake Hāwea and Cromwell. The fire moved through gullies and terraces behind Lagoon Avenue, Hunt Place and McLellan Place, and police went door to door evacuating houses as it spread.
No house caught fire and nobody was hurt. At the height of the blaze seven or eight properties were thought to be under direct threat. Residents were allowed back just after 10pm and the last crews left the scene shortly before 11pm, with rain overnight helping to put out what was left. The cause is still unknown and is being investigated.
Marty Lohrey, who lives in McLellan Place, opened his curtains to find the scrub behind his house alight. He told RNZ the fire built with frightening speed. “Very quickly they just flared up, within a few moments, probably 10-20 metres in the air,” he said. “Quite quickly the wind just whipped them down the terrace.” Looking at the blackened hillside the next morning, his verdict was blunt. “I think we’ve dodged a bullet because there’s no property damage. The fire boys were all here pretty quickly.”
Hunt Place resident Del Tubb said the first sign was the noise. “[We] looked out the window and it was like a blazing inferno right across the garden,” Tubb said. Another resident, Corey Young, said he could feel the heat from where he stood. “They got on top of it pretty quickly but it was very, very close to a number of houses, it was pretty scary actually,” Young said. “Some of the flames got probably a good 20 metres high at times.”
Fire and Emergency Assistant District Commander Nic McQuillan said the wind was the difficulty, both in fighting the fire and in the way it carried embers into unburnt ground. Crews spent the evening chasing hotspots, flare ups and ember transfers rather than one single fire front, which is why so many appliances were tied up on a fire that never reached a building.
McQuillan’s warning afterwards was aimed squarely at the assumption that late August is a safe time of year to be careless with fire. “We don’t know how the fire started but I would just ask people to be conscious of the fact that even though it’s still coming out of winter, everything is dry, the wind is a real problem when it comes to a spark or an ember that gets out of control,” he said. He asked people to make sure ashes are completely cold before they are tipped out, and to check conditions before lighting anything outdoors.
That point is worth sitting with, because it cuts against how most people read a winter landscape. The Upper Clutha basin was not in drought this month. Earth Sciences New Zealand, the public research organisation formed when NIWA and GNS Science merged in 2025, issued its seasonal climate outlook for August to October on 31 July, and for the West Coast, the Southern Alps, the foothills, inland Otago and Southland it put rainfall as most likely above normal and soil moisture as most likely near normal. Wet ground and a wet season do not stop a fire like this one. What burns first in kānuka and dry grass is the fine fuel, the leaf litter, the dead twigs and the standing dead material, and that dries out in hours rather than months.
The wind on Saturday did exactly that job. A series of fronts inside a strong and moist northwest flow crossed the country over the weekend, and MetService had strong wind warnings and watches out across the lower South Island, with gusts of up to 120kmh forecast in places for Sunday. Newswire reported on those warnings on Friday. Albert Town sits in the lee of the Southern Alps, and a northwest flow that arrives on the coast loaded with rain crosses the divide, dumps most of that rain on the western side and comes down into the Upper Clutha warm, gusty and dry. It is the same mechanism that makes Central Otago the driest part of the country in an ordinary year. Under those winds, fine fuels that felt damp in the morning will carry fire by evening.
The other detail that stands out is the ground itself. The fire ran through reserve land on steep, gullied terraces between houses and the river, which is exactly the sort of green edge that makes Albert Town pleasant to live in and also makes it hard to defend. Crews cannot easily get a truck onto that country, fire runs uphill faster than it runs on the flat, and a row of back fences is the only thing between the scrub and the houses. The Otago Daily Times reported that the steep terrain and the wind together were what slowed crews reaching the remaining flames.
Wānaka has grown quickly, and Albert Town has grown with it, which means more houses now back directly onto vegetated reserve than did twenty years ago. That is a pattern repeated around the country, from the Port Hills above Christchurch to the hills behind Nelson, and it is the reason Fire and Emergency keeps returning to the same unglamorous advice about clearing dead material from the boundary of a property, keeping gutters free of leaves and knowing what is stored against an outside wall.
For now the outcome in Albert Town is about as good as a fire of that size next to a suburb can produce. A kilometre of scrub is gone, twenty two families had a bad night, and every house is still standing. 1News reported that rain overnight finished the job the crews had started. Investigators will now work back from the burn pattern to a point of origin, and whether they find a cause or not, the lesson McQuillan offered stands on its own. Coming out of winter is not the same as being safe.
Were you in Albert Town on Saturday night, or have you had a fire come close to your own place? Tell us what happened in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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