0 Catastrophic Wildfire Conditions Threaten Australia’s NSW

New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, faces “catastrophic” wildfire conditions today with Sydney set to reach 43 degrees Celsius, after thousands of people were forced from their homes in the nation’s south. “The word ‘catastrophic’ is being used for good reason,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard told Channel Seven television in an interview today. “This is a very dangerous day.” 

Hundreds of emergency personnel are on standby and a total fire ban has been declared in the state, where more than 100 blazes are burning through bushland, according to the NSW Rural Fire Service. Emergency warnings are in place in southeast New South Wales, near the towns of Bega and Cooma. “We’ll see very hot, dry conditions and winds strong out of the center of Australia of up to 80 kilometers an hour,” Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons told Australian Broadcasting Corp. television today. 

“That’s resulting in the severe and extreme, and even catastrophic, fire conditions.” Bushfires are also burning in Victoria and South Australia states amid the most wide-ranging heat wave in a decade. Gillard surveyed the devastation in the island state of Tasmania yesterday after blazes destroyed about 100 properties and displaced about 3,000 people. A “catastrophic” alert, meaning any fire that starts has the potential to cause significant loss of life, has been issued for the NSW districts of Illawarra and Shoalhaven and the Southern Ranges south of Sydney, Deryn Griffiths, a forecaster with the Bureau of Meteorology, said.

Extreme heat   
A temperature of 43 degrees in Sydney would be the state capital’s third-highest in about 150 years of record-keeping, trailing the record of 45.3 degrees set on Jan. 14, 1939. “The temperatures will be hot and horrible,” Griffiths said. “We’ve got the strong winds over two-thirds of the state’s south, which will create fairly nasty fire conditions.” 

Australia’s hot, dry climate makes bushfires a major risk in the southern hemisphere’s summer. The worst fires in the nation’s history, the so-called Black Saturday blazes, killed 173 people as they swept through rural Victoria in February 2009. Eighty percent of the country recorded temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius last week, with such conditions forecast to continue in parts of South Australia, Victoria and NSW, according to the weather bureau.

Fire bans
Three major fires in Tasmania’s southeast, center and northwest are still burning out of control, Deputy Premier Bryan Green told ABC radio today. While conditions in the state are cooling, stronger winds today may hamper authorities in bringing the fires under control and move to a recovery phase, he said. “My thoughts are with New South Wales as they go through this day,” Green said. “Here in Tasmania it was frightening as the situation unfolded, so people must heed the warnings.” 

An emergency warning has been installed for the area between Forcett and the Tasman Peninsula in Tasmania, as the fire that destroyed much of the town of Dunalley last week flared up again today. Police in Tasmania have organized convoys involving 395 vehicles and about 750 people to escape from the Tasman Peninsula. About 500 vehicles and 1,500 people remain at the town of Nubeena on the peninsula, Tasmania Police said in a statement. Total fire bans are in place today for much of Victoria state, where more than 7,000 hectares has been burned by a fire northwest of Portland, according to authorities.

Strong winds
Hot temperatures in southeast Australia today will be exacerbated by strong winds, which could quickly spread fires, forecasters said. National capital Canberra is expecting a high of 38 degrees, Newcastle 40 degrees, and Broken Hill 44 degrees, according to the bureau. In the nation’s west, Perth is expecting 40 degrees. “Southeast Australia has been under extreme heat conditions for many days,” Fitzsimmons told reporters in Sydney yesterday. 

“That’s had a profound effect on depleting the moisture across the landscape which results in the grassland and forested areas being very susceptible to ignition.” Along with the threat of fire, heat waves pose a general risk to health, said Margaret Loughnan, a researcher at Melbourne’s Monash University. “Heat waves in Australia harm more people than any other natural disaster,” Loughnan said today. “Extreme heat events pose a risk to the health of all individuals, especially the elderly, young children and the chronically ill.”

Bloomberg
source : the jakarta globe