Firefighters yesterday raced to contain massive bushfires in southeastern Australia, taking advantage of a brief drop in temperatures and some much-needed rainfall before another heat wave strikes later this week.
Exhausted volunteers cleared ground vegetation and carried out controlled burns before temperatures and winds were expected to pick up again by Friday.
“It really is about shoring up protection to limit the damage potential and the outbreak of the fires over the coming days,” New South Wales Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said.
Photo: Reuters
He described conditions as “much more favorable,” but said that “we are expecting hotter weather to return later in the week.”
Dozens of vast blazes continue to burn out of control across the east of the country and there are growing fears that two fires in New South Wales and Victoria states could connect to form another uncontrollable mega-blaze.
Rainfall on Monday offered modest relief, but it was not heavy enough in most areas to extinguish the fires and in some places it hampered firefighters’ preparations by making back-burning more difficult.
Twenty-five people have died since the start of the disaster in September last year, more than 1,800 homes have been destroyed and about 8 million hectares have burned, an area the size of Ireland or South Carolina.
Smoke from the fires has been spotted more than 12,000km away in Chile and Argentina, weather authorities in the South American countries said.
The cost of the disaster is still not clear, but the Insurance Council of Australia said that claims worth A$700 million (US$482.4 million) had already been filed and the figure was expected to climb significantly.
The government has earmarked an initial A$2 billion for a national recovery fund to help devastated communities.
Conditions over the next week are not expected to match the worst days of the crisis, but Fitzsimmons told Australian Broadcasting Corp that it was important not to “get lulled into a false sense of security.”
There were some faint signs yesterday that a reprieve might be on the way, as Tropical Cyclone Blake carried heavy rain to the northwestern coast.
Blake is not expected to affect the bushfires raging in other parts of the massive country, but could signal a change in hot and dry conditions that have fueled the fires.
“It was nice to see a cyclone forming. I shouldn’t say that — hopefully no damage — but it was nice to see a cyclone forming up the top end of [Western Australia],” Fitzsimmons said.
“Hopefully [it is] a signal that we may see monsoon activity, which will disrupt the dominant hot air mass continuing to influence so much of the weather,” he added.
Meanwhile, police said that they had arrested three people for alleged offenses in bushfire areas as authorities sought to crack down on isolated incidents of looting.
“We are not living in South-Central LA [Los Angeles], we are not living in Syria… We don’t do this to each other,” New South Wales Minister for Police and Emergency Service David Elliott said.
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