A deluge of rain and wild weather could extinguish all remaining fires in New South Wales (NSW) by the end of the week, the Rural Fire Service (RFS) hopes.
Torrential rain over three days in the state, which has been ravaged by bushfires and endured a prolonged period of drought, has already extinguished one megablaze, with the Gospers Mountain fire that has burned for months in the Hawkesbury declared out yesterday.
Dams in the greater Sydney area, where water restrictions have been in place due to the drought, have also received more than their entire annual rainfall for last year in the space of a weekend.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Sydney’s water storage levels yesterday reached 64 percent, up 22 points on the previous week.
While the rain has been welcome news for firefighters, it has created chaos elsewhere — causing flooding, power outages and property damage.
The NSW RFS yesterday said there were still 33 active fires in the state, with five of those uncontained.
Only a week ago, more than 60 fires were burning across NSW and 33 of those were uncontained.
The five fires that are still burning out of control are all in the Bega Valley and Snowy Valley area in the state’s south. They include the Border fire and the Big Jack Mountain fire.
An RFS spokesman said that “all going well” it was likely those five fires would be out “in the next 48 hours.”
He said it there was optimism that all remaining fires in the state would remain at a contained status by the end of the week. It was possible all of them could be extinguished.
“It would be an absolute miracle. We hope so,” he said. “Certainly all contained. We’re hopeful to get to the stage where we can call them out.”
Firefighters have faced an unprecedented season and have been battling blazes since July last year.
The RFS yesterday said some of the biggest fires were now extinguished. They include the Gospers Mountain fire in the Hawkesbury, the Currowan fire in the Shoalhaven, the Green Wattle Creek fire in Wollondilly, the Myall Creek Road fire (Richmond Valley), the Erskine Creek fire (Blue Mountains), the Kerry Ridge fire (Muswellbrook) and the Morton fire (Wingecarribee).
The spokesman said there would still be some work for remote area crews to extinguish smaller materials such as smoldering tree stumps and logs in some locations.
He said the significant rainfall was likely to lead to more benign conditions for the remainder of the season, but stressed there were still months to go.
“As we’ve seen in the last couple of years, we’ve still had bushfires threaten homes in March and April,” he said. “We know all it takes is a couple of weeks of warm and windy conditions.”
The wild weather triggered widespread chaos over the weekend.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology issued warnings for abnormally high tides for most of the NSW coast last night and severe thunderstorm warnings were in place for the northern rivers region and parts of the mid-north coast.
Some parts of the state have had up to 700 millimeters (mm) of rainfall since Wednesday, including Robertson, in the southern highlands, which saw 698mm of rain — 500mm of which was over the weekend alone.
Pottsville was battered with close to 605mm of rain, while the central tablelands received 631mm since Wednesday.
The bureau said floods around Sydney over the weekend and into yesterday were the most significant that had been seen in about 30 years.
Warragamba dam’s storage levels had reached 60.7 percent yesterday, up 17.7 percent on the previous week.
Rain was easing in Sydney yesterday, but was forecast to continue during the week, while the weather system responsible for the flooding around Sydney was moving south into the south coast and into the East Gippsland region of Victoria.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS