Australian bushfires ‘off the scale’ amid heatwave

SYDNEY // Eastern Australia is experiencing severe “off the scale” fire conditions in a record-breaking heatwave, prompting the evacuation of some sparsely-populated parts of New South Wales on Sunday.

The heatwave on Australia’s east coast saw temperatures hit records in some parts of the state, creating conditions that officials said were worse than those preceding Victoria’s 2009 “Black Saturday” fires, Australia’s worst bush fire event that killed 173 people.

And it may have been started deliberately. A 13-year-old boy and a 40-year-old man were charged on Sunday for allegedly starting fires.

By Sunday afternoon, emergency warnings were issued for five rural areas in New South Wales (NSW). People were told to evacuate if they could, or seek shelter and avoid bush or grassland where it was too late to leave.

More than 2,000 firefighters, many of them volunteers, were battling 86 fires across New South Wales on Sunday afternoon, with 38 of them not under control.

While bushfires are common during the dry Australian summer, climate change has pushed up land and sea temperatures and led to more extremely hot days and severe fire seasons.

“The conditions for Sunday are the worst possible conditions when it comes to fire danger ratings,” said Shane Fitzsimmons, the rural fire service commissioner for the state of New South Wales (NSW). “They are catastrophic. They are labelled catastrophic for a reason — they are rare, they are infrequent, and to put it simply they are off the old conventional scale. It’s not another summer’s day. It’s not another bad fire weather day. This is as bad as it gets in these circumstances.”

He said the fires were spreading so fast that several homes and farm sheds across the state were probably lost. A paper mill, water treatment operations and Australia’s largest aluminium smelter, Tomago, were among businesses which halted operations to conserve energy as the heatwave conditions caused cancellation of major sporting events and put pressure on the electricity grid.

One individual from Boggabri, a small town in north-western NSW was flown 470 kilometres to Sydney to be treated for burns.

Temperature records for February were also being broken further north in Queensland, the bureau of meteorology said, with the thermometer climbing to above 45°C and hot north-westerly winds coming from Australia’s desert centre at speeds of up to 75 kilometres an hour, were fanning the bushfires.

Cooler conditions were forecast to come through later on Sunday with a southerly wind change linked to a cold front forecast to arrive by early evening, the Bureau of Meteorology said

* Reuters

* Agence France-Presse