Firefighters rush to contain bushfires in Kings Park in central Perth

The Arson Squad is investigating several bushfires burning in Kings Park in central Perth.

Police said the cause of the fire is being treated as suspicious, and said early indications were that the fire had multiple ignition points.

Police said they did not have a suspect in custody at the moment. 

Authorities received reports of a fire at 2.42pm, and the blazes were elevated to a Watch and Act alert level — the second most severe — just before 4.30pm.

The alert is in place for people in an area bounded by Lovekin Drive, Poole Ave, Thomas Street and May Drive and there is a possible threat to lives and homes. 

Department of Fire and Emergency Services Incident Controller Clint Kuchel said there was “no current threat” to Perth Children’s Hospital, despite it being right next to the fire ground.

He said initial reports indicated there were five separate ignition points in the park.

“The fire’s burnt about 4.5 hectares at this point in time — crews will be here for quite some time and there is a lot of smoke in the area,” he said.

“It’s an ecologically sensitive area so crews are bound to work from tracks to make sure they don’t do any disruption to any native vegetation.

“We have about 45 Kings Park and DFES fire fighting crews, with support from Western Australian police as well.”

Kings Park has been closed to the public.

‘It was metres away’

The ABC spoke to a witness, Lincoln, as he was preparing to leave the park in a car with a friend.

Lincoln said the flames were just metres away from him.

“We’re at a picnic, enjoying some lunch and then the whole bush was on fire — I didn’t even see it happen,” he said.

“It was metres away. I thought I was going to burn.”

Kayleigh works at Zamia Café in Kings Park, not far from May Drive Parkland, which is where authorities say the fires were burning.

She told ABC Radio Perth the smoke at first seemed about 350 metres away before it escalated quickly, forcing her and the other staff to evacuate.

“We saw the Kings Park guides, they went in [to the smoke] in their trucks,” she said.

“Not that long after we saw them racing out, by the time they’ve raced out we literally saw the fire just go straight up the trees across from us and that was when we were like, ‘okay we need to go’.”

She said it was not until she was driving out of the park, away from the smoke as directed, that she heard multiple fires were burning.

“But the crazy thing was … it looked like I was still driving into a fire, and I wasn’t aware that there were actually multiple fires,” she said.

The Department of Fire and Emergency Services says the bushfire is moving in a northerly direction and is not contained or controlled. 

Visit Emergency WA, call DFES on 133 337, follow DFES on Twitter or listen to ABC Local Radio to stay up to date.