Australia fires could be out of control for months, says fire chief
Source: Associated Press
Australia fires could be out of control for months, says fire chief
Ben Doherty in Sydney
@bendohertycorro
Tue 12 Nov 2019 14.29 GMT
First published on Tue 12 Nov 2019 10.51 GMT
Concern grows over wind changes and high temperatures forecast for later this week
It could be months before eastern Australia has more than a million hectares of bushfires under control, the New South Wales fire chief has warned, as the country faces one of its worst bushfire outbreaks.
After relief that no further lives were lost on Tuesday, concern was growing over unpredictable wind changes worsening fires in the neighbouring state of Queensland, with much hotter temperatures also predicted for the Sydney area next week.
Shane Fitzsimmons, the commissioner of the NSW rural fire services, said: “The real challenge is we have an enormous amount of country that is still alight. They won’t have this out for days, weeks, months. Unfortunately the forecast is nothing but above-average temperatures and below-average rainfall over the next few months and we’ve still got summer around the corner.”
The current fires in NSW cover four times the land area that burned during the whole of 2018, according to Fitzsimmons. There are also fires in Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory.
Three people died in out-of-control bushfires at the weekend, two of them apparently trying to flee fast-moving fire fronts in cars.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/12/australia-fires-rage-out-of-control-catastrophic-day
= new reply since forum marked as read
on the news at all. all the media time is taken up with one man who doesn't believe in climate change.
?r=1573407678441
?r=1573407678547
