Tasmania Fire Service chief officer Chris Arnol said the service is at maximum capacity.

“Whilst we have some 50 people from interstate here now we are planning today to request an additional 80 personnel.” 

Mr Arnol said the additional firefighters will be needed to assist in fires in remote areas. 

“We will also be asking for some special fire behaviour analysts, we only have a few in Tasmania.”

TFS specialist fire analysts have yet not mapped all the fires and therefore have not be able to predict where they may spread. 

“The most worrying fires are the ones we don’t know about,” Mr Arnol said. 

“We certainly have good capability. There comes a time when protracted events mean that you run out of capacity you need to rest people.

“We are trying to now go full tilt with a state operations centre, three regional operations centres, two level three incident management teams and sustain those for couple of weeks. 

“We know that we will max out on that so we are getting ahead of the curve by requesting further resources from interstate.” 

Mr Arnol said the number of fires burning has reduced from 70 to 64 on Thursday afternoon. 

“We did some good work on the Great Pine Tier fire on Wednesday with a large air tanker than we have in the state from Victoria right now and that is continuing to drop water, and water only, on fires, and that is proving effective.

“Our strategy of going hard and fast, and getting onto them early to gain a hold has worked quite well so far.”

Spotter flights, aerial water bombing and the hard work of ground crew has allowed the TFS to contain or extinguish some of the 50 fires reported as going. 

Mr Arnol said none of the current fires are threatening any communities but it is important that communities remain vigilant. 

“We need to be mindful right now that it is only January. The peak of our bushfire season is February.

“There are fires all around us now and anything could happen in the next week or so.”

Parks and Wildlife Service director of operations Mark Bryce said the service is working with TFS to assess the situation with the priority of extracting bushwalkers. 

“It is made a lot easier if people register their walks. We are asking people before they venture out to stay informed of the conditions, to use the logbooks at the head of the tracks so we know who is out there and to check the TFS website and Parks website for up to date information on track closures,” Mr Bryce said. 

“We had a couple of groups evacuated and they hadn’t registered in the logbooks so it relies on helicopters over flying the area to be able to see these people and where the forest is thick sometime we can’t see them.

“The message is not the venture out in remote areas unless you’ve obtained reliable information the area is safe.”

Mr Bryce said fires were assessed on the basis of environment, assets and population centers and resources are allocated based on this. 

“Parks at the moment is looking at natural values under threat from these fires and assessing what we can do under the circumstances to protect those assets,” Mr Bryce said. 

Bureau of Meteorology state manager Simon McCulloch said the rain across the state on Thursday has been largely insignificant. 

“Winds are quite light, dominated with coastal sea breezes,” Mr McCulloch said, but are expected to go up to 40-45kms into the weekend. 

Mr McCulloch said quite high temperatures in the middle of next week are expected. 

The TFS has advice alerts on the Lake Fergus and Great Pine Tier in the Central Plateau and Gell River fires. 

A smoke alert is in place for greater Hobart, the D'entrecasteaux Channel, Derwent Valley, Huon Valley and Bruny Island.

Up to date fire information can be found by listening to ABC local radio or on the TFS website at www.fire.tas.gov.au. 

The discovery of fires can be reported by calling Triple Zero (000).