Aircraft dropped water bombs on raging Australian bush fires on Saturday as a ”once in a century” heatwave sparked dozens of blazes across the country.
Wildfires are a natural annual event in Australia, but this year fire conditions are some of the worst in living memory, a combination of scorching weather, drought and tinder-dry bush.
Local media have said it is a ”once in a century heatwave” that has scorched south-eastern Australia for more than a week.
Officials said dozens of fires were blazing across the country’s densely populated south-east, and police said at least one that hit Sydney’s metropolitan area late on Friday had been deliberately lit.
As temperatures in Melbourne soared to 45 degrees Celsius on Saturday, a major fire east of the city had burned more than 160ha of parkland after jumping containment lines overnight.
A Reuters photographer at the scene of the fire on the outskirts of Melbourne said aircraft were water-bombing spot fires that were breaking out ahead of the main front.
”It is extremely dry. We do have some concern about the winds picking up and having an impact on the fire,” a spokesperson for Victoria state’s Country Fire Authority told Reuters.
An ”urgent threat message” was posted for local communities to be prepared to be hit by fire and threat notices were issued for several other areas.
Fire officials in Australia advise residents to stay and defend their homes against bush fires, as most homes are damaged not by the actual firefront but burning embers blown on to roofs.
Evacuation is a last resort and fire officials advise residents to leave well before a firefront nears.
In New South Wales, authorities said more than 40 fires were burning, with bush-fire emergencies declared in several places. Smoke covered many areas of Sydney, which came under threat from two fires late on Friday.
The heatwave will not affect commodity crops such as wheat and sugar, which are grown predominately in western and northern Australia.
Arson suspected
Police blamed a fire that broke out in the inner-Sydney district of Lane Cove on Friday night on arson. The fire burnt several hectares of a national park within the Sydney metropolitan area, threatening nearby homes.
Researchers say about half of the bush fires in Australia are deliberately lit.
Another fire in the Wollemi national park, the home of the famous ”living fossil”, the Wollemi pine, had destroyed 1 000ha of forest north-west of Sydney, a spokesperson for the New South Wales state Rural Fire Service told Reuters.
”The fire is moving quite quickly,” spokesperson Rebel Talbert said, adding that a bush-fire emergency had been declared there and aircraft with water bombs were trying to bring it under control.
Another blaze near the coast south of Sydney had jumped containment lines and was proving hard to control. Authorities in South Australia said they were tackling a fire near the southern community of Mount Gambier.
The heatwave has caused a spate of heat-related deaths, which has left morgues struggling to cope, while transport and power services have repeatedly broken down in the hot weather.
Tens of thousands of firefighters are on standby to cope with bush fire outbreaks in three states, with authorities in Victoria warning Saturday’s conditions could be worse than those that led to the deadly ”Ash Wednesday” fires of 1983, which killed 75. — Reuters