Australian residents lived in fear of a "megafire" Monday as dozens of bush blazes threaten to converge after already consuming thousands of hectares of land.
Officials also warned
that a smoke cloud over Sydney may affect residents' health, as the
broken promise of rain may make firefighters' already daunting task more
difficult.
"The fuel bed is very,
very dry. We've had a series of high wind, high temperature, low
humidity days. That causes fires to run quite hard. For instance, the
fire that started last Thursday ran 35 kilometers in one day," said
Stuart Midgely, a New South Wales Rural Fire Service incident controller
and the top coordinator for the Blue Mountains blaze.
As Wednesday promises
more wind and higher temperatures, crews are working "to get containment
lines in as deep as we can before that bad weather comes back and
potentially blows the fires back up again," he said.
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Compounding matters is
"fairly widespread" lightning in western New South Wales, storms that
are being accompanied by little to no rain, said Rural Fire Service
Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons.
"We are not expecting any
meaningful rainfall to be of any benefit across any of the current fire
grounds," he said, noting that the rain forecast for the weekend never
materialized.
What you need to know about wildfires
Destruction spreading
The fires are swallowing
up large areas of bush in New South Wales, Australia's most populous
state, where authorities have declared a state of emergency. More than
200 homes have been damaged or destroyed.
One in three Australians live in New South Wales.
In at least one town, Bilpin, firefighters were forced to stop containing the fire to focus instead on protecting homes.
Forecasts of high
temperatures, low humidity and strong winds over the next few days in
the Blue Mountains region, west of Sydney, have state officials
especially concerned.
Sixty-two fires are
raging in the state, 14 of them out of control, authorities said Monday.
More than 1,000 firefighters are battling the blazes that have burned
116,167 hectares (about 287,000 acres) -- an area roughly the size of
Los Angeles.
Local officials fear that three large fires spreading through the Blue Mountains could merge to form one huge inferno.
"If they do join up and
push to the south, there is the potential that many heavily inhabited
suburbs along the Great Western Highway in our Blue Mountains region may
be directly impacted by fire," said Alex Chesser, a spokesman for the
fire service.
"It is unusual to see
fires this size so close to Sydney," he said. "And this one does pose a
significant amount of risk to hundreds of thousands of properties in the
Blue Mountains area, should the wind change."
Total fire ban
The state of emergency
issued by authorities gives firefighters and police the authority to
carry out measures such as cutting off water, power and gas and ordering
mandatory evacuations of areas at risk.
Firefighters in the Blue
Mountains worked hard Monday "back-burning" -- using small, controlled
fires to burn away flammable material in a bush fire's expected path --
to try to get the upper hand on the most threatening fires.
A total fire ban is in
place for the Greater Sydney region until further notice, officials have
said, meaning no fire may be lit in the open, and all fire permits are
suspended.
The fires have spread a cloak of smog over Sydney in recent days.
The bush fires in the
area spread out of control Thursday amid high temperatures and powerful
winds. Emergency officials said the region is emerging from a very dry
winter and has had little rain in recent months.
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The causes of the Blue
Mountains fires are still under investigation -- officials are looking
into whether one major blaze was caused by a military training exercise.
2 boys arrested
Police said Monday they
had arrested two boys, age 11 and 15, over two earlier bush fires in the
Port Stephens area, more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of
Sydney, that began October 13. One of the fires they are accused of
starting burned more than 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres) in the
surrounding area.
The 11-year-old has been
charged with two counts of intentionally causing fire and being
reckless as to its spread, NSW Police Force said, and the 15-year-old is
expected to be charged.
The linking of the boys
to the start of those fires has come as "quite a shock to the local
community, to authorities and to the fire crews who have been working so
hard to put these fires out," said Cameron Price, a reporter from Sky
News Australia.
One volunteer
firefighter, Michael Green, reported making a harrowing drive through
the fire lines to his home in the mountain town of Dargan.
He said he and his wife
could feel the intense heat through their windows. The fire had passed,
but burned trees were still glowing red and the hot spots "were still
quite severe," he said.
"It was a bit risky, but I had to get home to see if the house was all right, and the dog," Green said. They were.
"It's just a lucky wind
change," said Green, who shot video of his dash through the burned-out
countryside on Thursday. "The winds were blowing right up, and at the
last minute, they changed into a southerly, which took it away from the
actual house."
At least one death has
been reported. A 63-year-old man died of a suspected heart attack Friday
while defending his home against a blaze on the New South Wales Central
Coast, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, or ABC, reported.
Walter Lindner collapsed while working alongside his neighbor to save his heritage-listed homestead, according to ABC.
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