On Australia’s east coast, smoke has descended like fog.

Wildfires have triggered a state of emergency in New South Wales and Queensland, threatening hundreds of thousands of people, homes and wildlife.

Jason Tylor and his family are sheltering in the village of Krambach, about 200 miles northeast of Sydney, after flames forced them to abandon their house and run for their lives.

Their car boot now contains everything they could salvage – a tangle of jewellery hastily shoved into a box, some cat food, a few clothes.

It was his son Tyann’s 15th birthday at the weekend – an event that had to be marked away from home.

Jason told me he was “100%” worried for his life, and three houses in his street have been “lost” already.

“I’ve been in a cyclone before – it came through like a cyclone,” he said.

“The wind – it just blew everything almost 90 degrees. Things were blown off the table and I was just, ‘get out, straight away, get out’. It was unbelievable.”

As we drove further north, warnings of fires became more frequent and roads were closed in front of us, the route no longer safe.

Firefighters are stationed on roads, ready to raise the alarm if further towns need to evacuate.

The majority of them are volunteering, giving up days at work as they try to protect the community they love.

Chris Horman, from New South Wales Rural Fire Service, has been battling bush fires for more than 20 years, and says this latest crop is “unprecedented”.

He has seen “nothing this big” and says a large fire can be started by a “match or a cigarette”.

He told me: “There’s a lot of fires going around at the moment and I don’t think anybody’s seen this amount of fires. Whichever way the wind blows, that’s the way the fire goes.”

More than half the blazes in New South Wales are uncontained, with soaring temperatures and strong winds making conditions even more treacherous.

Meanwhile Australia’s biggest city, Sydney, is on high alert for the first time ever.

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