Residents of a region of Australia engulfed by bushfires were told on Tuesday to go home and pack their belongings two hours before Christmas as emergency crews worked to contain the blazes.

Communities around Victoria’s Grampians have been evacuated, with authorities warning conditions there in the coming days could be the worst since Australia’s worst fire season on record, the so-called “black summer” of 2019-20 of.

Bushfires have burned more than 41,000 hectares (101,000 acres) in the past week but have caused no deaths or property damage.

High temperatures forecast for Boxing Day have also triggered a series of fire warnings across the country.

Temperatures across Victoria are expected to reach 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) with strong dry winds, while parts of South Australia and New South Wales could also face bushfires from Thursday to Friday.

“We are expecting extreme fire danger across almost the entire state,” Victoria Control Center spokesman Luke Hegarty said.

“This is the worst fire danger the state has experienced since the ‘Black Summer’, across all areas of the state we are talking about. It is important that people understand Thursday is a day with huge potential,” he added.

Four interstate fire services and two incident management teams, consisting of more than 100 personnel, will arrive in Victoria in the coming days to provide respite to emergency crews working around the clock to extinguish the current fires.

On Tuesday morning, the state’s Country Fire Service (CFA) chief executive Jason Heffernan decided to allow families around the Grampians to temporarily enter their homes “to collect Christmas items…presents etc”.

“(This is) to ensure that the residents of Halls Gap who relocate over the Christmas period at least have what they need,” he told Seven’s Sunrise programme.

Mary Ann Brown, who lives on the southern edge of the Grampians National Park, told the ABC her community was on edge over the upcoming holidays.

“We’re not going to be out of this until we get some really heavy rain, and that probably won’t come until March or April, so it’s going to be a long summer.”

Parts of Australia are on high alert for bushfire danger this summer after experiencing several quiet seasons compared to the 2019-20 fires. linked to hundreds of deaths and swept over 24 million hectares of land.

The country has been hit by one disaster after another in recent years, experiencing record floods and extreme heat due to the effects of climate change.