Sydney-Sana
The Australian authorities today urged about a quarter of a million people to evacuate their homes as rising temperatures and wind speeds are expected to fuel deadly forest fires across the continent's east coast.
Reuters quoted Andrew Crisp, Commissioner for Emergency Management, Victoria, as saying to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “We have issued an alert about an emergency and we have sent text messages to 240,000 people mainly across the eastern part of the state ... If it is possible to get out, get out and stay away from the remote parts covered by forests from our state. ”
Temperatures are expected to exceed 40 degrees Celsius in several parts of Australia today, threatening to ignite the forest fire season that has already destroyed nearly 2,000 homes. 27 people have died and thousands have been displaced due to massive fires burning in more than 25.5 million acres, an area the size of South Korea .
More than 150 fires are still burning across the country, and the authorities fear that a windward shift later today will fuel the fire and change the direction of many fires. The wind is still strong and can be classified as "harmful" and is expected to hit the cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
Australia fires outpace other catastrophic fires around the world, and fires in California, Brazil, and Indonesia in 2019 together account for less than half of the burned area in Australia, while environmentalists at the University of Sydney talk about the deaths or injury of a billion animals in forest fires.