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Embers are raining down on communities across Australia.

“The strong winds of a thunderstorm came through, but instead of raining water it was raining embers,” one resident told The Sydney Morning Herald. Another described how, as he and his family tried to evacuate on New Year’s Eve, “burning embers started falling and houses were starting to get lost.”

More than two dozen people have died in wildfires that started burning in Australia in September. In recent weeks, fires on the east coast of the country have spread quickly with the help of hot-dry weather, burning through millions of acres and forcing thousands of residents to evacuate. Nearly 2,000 homes have been destroyed.

And the airborne embers — not the flames — are largely to blame.

“We’ve really started to isolate that it’s not necessarily the wall of flames that’s igniting homes,” says Daniel Gorham, a research engineer with the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety in the United States. “Rather, the embers that are traveling ahead of the fire are igniting homes.”

The bigger the fire, the farther it can disperse embers, and the larger and more dangerous those embers can be. As climate change exacerbates heat waves, droughts and poor land use decisions in Australia’s arid regions, bushfires are getting larger and more intense — exactly the types of blazes that can fling embers for miles.

Australian Fires Prompt Questions About Protecting Houses From Embers

Photo: Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images