Australians were bracing yesterday for what officials warned could be the worst fire danger day ever seen, as police searched for about 100 people still missing in ravaged Tasmania.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard urged Australians to be vigilant in coming days, with scorching temperatures predicted in several states and hundreds of blazes already raging.
The danger was most acute in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, with the mercury expected to hit 43°C in Sydney today.
Photo: EPA
New South Wales Premier Barry O’Farrell sounded a grim warning about the forecast record heat and high winds, with a large amount of grass and vegetation ripe for burning due to bumper spring rains.
“Tomorrow will be perhaps the worst fire danger day this state has ever faced,” O’Farrell said.
Thousands of firefighters and about 70 aircraft were on standby, with about 90 blazes already burning — 20 out of control — and catastrophic conditions forecast for regions south of Sydney. Introduced after the 2009 Black Saturday firestorm in Victoria State, which claimed 173 lives, a catastrophic rating means fires will be uncontrollable, unpredictable and very fast-moving, with evacuation the only safe option.
Extreme conditions were also expected in Victoria today, with fires already burning there.
Approximately 13 million of Australia’s 23 million people live in Victoria and New South Wales.
Gillard called on those in danger zones to decide in advance whether they would evacuate or stay.
“These are extreme events ... we live in a country that is hot and dry and where we sustain very destructive fires,” Gillard said.
Wildfires destroyed more than 100 homes on the southern island of Tasmania over the weekend and police were searching for about 100 people still unaccounted for.
“That’s not to say that there’s 100 people that have come to harm, it’s just to say that we really need to focus on those people as a priority,” acting police commissioner Scott Tilyard told reporters.
No bodies had been uncovered in searches of the worst-hit areas, with 245 properties examined including 90 badly damaged or destroyed buildings.
Tilyard said it would be some time before there was any certainty on fatalities, with police working through about 500 missing person reports.
Police said initial investigations of the Tasmania fires suggested that they were ignited accidentally as residents who narrowly escaped the fire front described darkness as it approached.
“As the fire came through, what had been a really bright red sky turned absolutely pitch black,” survivor Del Delagarno told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio.
Her home was one of just six in the seaside town of Boomer Bay left standing.
“It was ... the darkest midnight you’ve ever seen — it was absolutely horrendous,” she added.
Wildfires are a fact of life in vast, but sparsely populated and arid Australia, particularly in the hot summer months.
Aside from New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, fires were burning in the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory, and South Australia and Queensland states.
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS