SYDNEY: Four years since bushfires destroyed wide swathes of southeastern Australia, killing 33, the country is once again on high alert, bracing for what weather experts say will be the hottest, driest period since the so-called Black Summer.
Just into the Australian spring, which starts in September, heat records are being broken in the densely populated area around Sydney, with some regional schools closed due to bushfire risk a month before the official bushfire season begins.
Adding to the tension, unusually heavy rain since the fires of 2019 and 2020 has spurred vegetation growth, producing more foliage to burn in an El Nino weather system, typified by hot, dry weather, which was declared on Tuesday.
“Once we’ve actually dried out the landscape from the wet conditions it’s starting from, it could be that we end up with a landscape that’s very dry but now has a lot of fuel because we’ve had such good vegetation growth,” said Jason Evans, a professor at the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales.
“That would be perfect conditions for bushfires,” he said.
Australians watched with grim recognition as wildfires ripped through Europe and North America in the 2023 Northern summer. Now there is a sense that it is the Australians’ turn again, with global warming speeding up and exaggerating changes in weather patterns, according to climate scientists.
Of Australia’s 10 hottest years on record, eight were since 2010, meteorologists say.
The short amount of time since the last catastrophic bushfire season has contributed to delays in hazard reduction burns, where firefighters pre-emptively burn off areas to limit the spread of bushfires, because some volunteer firefighters quit due to trauma, says the New South Wales Rural Fire Service.
The persistent heavy rain has also slowed the fire service’s ability to carry out controlled burns. With dozens of bushfires already burning, the volunteer service said it had done just 24 percent of the hazard reduction it had planned.
“We’ve just had rain after rain after rain event so we’re quite behind,” Rural Fire Service Commissioner Bob Rogers told Reuters.
The heavy rains also mean that, despite the return of dry heat, the starting conditions are different to the fires of 2019 and 2020, which followed a lengthy drought, said Rogers.
While rich in fuel, at least it is not tinder dry like it was in the Black Summer.
Still, “we’re taking it very seriously,” he added. “While it may not be as bad as that, you don’t need a fire season to be as bad as that for it to destroy homes and indeed take lives.”
Australia, scarred by bushfires, on high alert for dangerous summer
https://arab.news/9pejv
Australia, scarred by bushfires, on high alert for dangerous summer
- Heat records are being broken in the densely populated area around Sydney
- Persistent heavy rain has also slowed the fire service’s ability to carry out controlled burns
Kyiv mayor calls for temporary evacuation over heating outages
- “Moscow is trying to use cold weather as a tool of terror,” Zelensky said
- He said 20 residential buildings in Kyiv had been damaged, including the Qatari embassy
KYIV: Mass heating outages caused by Russian strikes on Kyiv are set to last into the weekend, as the capital’s mayor called on residents to temporarily leave the city with sub-zero temperatures expected to fall even lower.
A massive missile and drone attack on Kyiv killed four and ripped open apartment blocks. Moscow also fired its feared Oreshnik ballistic missile at western Ukraine, drawing condemnation from Europe.
The barrage came hours after Moscow rejected a plan by Kyiv and its Western allies to deploy peacekeeping forces to Ukraine should a ceasefire be reached.
AFP journalists in Kyiv saw residents running for shelter late Thursday night as the air raid siren echoed, and heard Russian drones exploding into residential buildings and missiles whistling over the capital.
“Moscow is trying to use cold weather as a tool of terror,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said at a meeting in Kyiv with British Defense Secretary John Healy.
He said 20 residential buildings in Kyiv had been damaged, including the Qatari embassy, in one of the largest attacks on the capital for months.
Qatar expressed “deep regret” over the embassy hit and said that none of its staff there had been harmed.
- ‘Very difficult’ situation -
The Russian barrage left around half of all apartment blocks in the capital, some 6,000 buildings, without heating, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said.
Temperatures are set to fall to -15C on Saturday.
Officials said they were hopeful some heating could be restored on Friday night.
“In some areas where the damage is more complex, additional time is needed,” Ukraine’s Restoration Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said.
Klitschko said the situation was “very difficult” and called on “residents of the capital who have the opportunity to temporarily leave the city for places with alternative sources of power and heat to do so.”
City authorities said they had set up 1,200 warming centers.
- Russia fires rarely-used missile -
A medic who died at a building that was struck in a repeat attack was among the four killed, officials said. Another 26 were wounded.
Nina, 70, who lives in one of the buildings hit, told AFP she was angry that the world was talking about a possible deal to end the conflict at a time when Russia was launching such deadly barrages.
“Where is Europe, where is America? It doesn’t hurt them the same way,” she said.
Her neighbor, 58-year-old Kostiantyn Kondratchenko fought the second-floor blaze from a drone hit with a hose used to water flowers, he told AFP.
The barrage is just the latest to batter Ukraine as diplomats wrangle for a breakthrough in what has been Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
Russia has shown no sign of slowing down its ground offensive or aerial bombardments.
Moscow’s defense ministry said it had fired the Oreshnik ballistic missile on “strategic targets” — only the second time the new weapon, which the Kremlin says is impossible to stop, is known to have been used.
- ‘Escalatory and unacceptable’ -
Ukrainian authorities said a ballistic missile traveling “at about 13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) per hour” had struck an “infrastructure facility” near the western city of Lviv.
It said Russia had attacked “civilian infrastructure,” without specifying the target or extent of any damage.
The Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile that can be equipped with both nuclear and conventional warheads.
Lviv region officials said that radiation levels were within normal range after the attack.
France, Germany and Britain condemned Moscow’s “escalatory and unacceptable” use of Oreshnik, a UK government spokeswoman said after a call between leaders of the three countries.
Across the border in Russia’s Belgorod, the governor said more than half a million people were without power or heating after a Ukrainian attack targeted the region’s utilities.
Despite intense diplomatic efforts led by US President Donald Trump, a deal to end the fighting remains elusive.
Moscow baulked this week after European leaders and US envoys announced post-war guarantees for Ukraine would include a US-led monitoring mechanism and a multinational force.
Russia called the plan “dangerous” and “destructive.”
Key territorial issues are also unresolved as Russia insists on getting full control of Ukraine’s Donbas region, part of which is still controlled by Kyiv.
Russia occupies around 20 percent of Ukraine.
Tens of thousands have been killed since it invaded in February 2022, millions forced to flee their homes and much of eastern and southern Ukraine decimated.
