| Category List Back |
| Major: BULLETIN Fire AustrailIa fires worst in history 119 deg Fah. |
| Sub: (Click below) |
| No Subcategories found! |
|
| BULLETIN Fire AustrailIa fires worst in history 119 deg Fah. |
DEATH TOLL 131 INJURIES IN THE HUNDREDS
The New York Times
February 10, 2009
Death Toll in Australian Fires Climbs to 131
By MERAIAH FOLEY The New York Times
SYDNEY, Australia — Fanned by the hottest temperatures on record, a series of wildfires tore through southern Australia over the weekend, killing at least 131 people in the country’s deadliest natural disaster on record, the police said Monday.
Forensic investigators descended on the fire zone Monday to begin identifying bodies found in the rubble. Police warned the death toll could rise.
Officials suspect that some of Saturday’s fires were set deliberately. Huge tracts of land were declared crime scenes and police announced a special task force to hunt suspected arsonists, who could face murder charges.
A man and a boy were charged with lighting fires on the outskirts of Sydney in two unrelated cases on Monday.
Again and again, survivors of the fires that ripped across the southern state of Victoria on Saturday told the same story — the fires came without warning and too fast for anyone to act.
Thomas Libreri, a home builder in the alpine village of Kinglake, one of several towns nearly destroyed in the weekend blazes, said the first sign of trouble was when he heard the roar of flames coming over a ridge toward his house.
“I heard the noise, and then I had about 20 seconds to react — that’s how fast it came,” Mr. Libreri told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Monday.
In minutes, the fires had razed most of the homes on his block, leaving one man with severe burns. Mr. Libreri said he and a neighbor grabbed the injured man and threw him into a swimming pool, where they waited six hours for rescue teams to arrive.
Some panicked residents tried to flee the inferno in their cars, but crashed into trees, embankments and other vehicles amid the thick smoke. Police said a number of people died trying to outrun the blaze, including six people found burned to death in a single car.
Photographs from the fire zone showed the smoldering remains of several burned out cars scattered along the region’s highways, some with the doors flung open as if their terrified passengers had tried to make a last bolt for safety on foot.
At least 750 homes were destroyed, displacing more than 1,000 people, many of whom have been left with nothing.
Sonja Parkinson and her 2-year-old son were among those who escaped with only the clothes they were wearing. When their home began to disintegrate in the flames, they made a run for a nearby creek, where they huddled under sodden blankets as the fire blazed around them.
“They say a bushfire sounds like a freight train coming,” Ms. Parkinson told The Australian newspaper. “But it sounded like a freight train as big as the entire space you could see, the entire horizon. It was that much noise and force.”
At least three dozen fires hit Victoria on Saturday, but most of the damage was wrought by a 60-mile-long blaze that razed Kinglake and destroyed several other small villages northeast of Melbourne.
Police tape was strewn around the wreckage of several houses in the tiny town of Strathewen, where up to 30 of the town’s 200 people were thought to have died in the blaze, according to a reporter from The Age newspaper who toured the site with a fire official.
The Victoria state police commissioner, Christine Nixon, said the process of removing and identifying the dead could take days, as police were treating each death as a potential homicide.
“This will take some time,” Ms. Nixon told reporters. “It is a complex matter and we must be accurate.”
Australians are no strangers to wildfires. Every summer, thousands of fires burn across this hot, dry continent, and there are not enough firefighters to protect every home. Many rural Australians know that it is only a matter of time before they, or someone they know, will face a stark choice — evacuate or stay to fight the fires.
Fire authorities across Australia advise residents who choose to defend their homes to stay indoors while the worst of the blaze passes. Citing statistics from past fires, the agencies say that most people can survive a wildfire if they avoid direct contact with the searing temperatures and scalding gas that come with an advancing fire.
However, many of the residents caught up in the Victoria blazes had no time for an orderly escape, and some were killed when the houses they were sheltering in collapsed around them.
The state premier, John Brumby, announced that the government would set up a commission to examine the emergency response to Saturday’s fires, and review the longstanding policy of advising residents to “stay and defend or leave early.”
“People will want to review that, examine that. It may be right, it may not be,” Mr. Brumby told a local radio station on Monday. “There is no question that there were people who did everything right, put in place their fire plan and it wouldn’t matter, their house was just incinerated.”
Wildfires have been burning across Victoria for weeks, but record temperatures of up to 117 degrees combined with the most severe drought in the country’s history to create the worst fire conditions ever seen in Australia, Brumby said.
Scientists have been warning for years that climate change will bring higher temperatures and lower rainfall to Australia, increasing the likelihood of deadly wildfires. Some questioned whether Saturday’s fire was a sign of things to come.
“It’s a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change,” said Bob Brown, the leader of Australia’s minor Greens Party.
Home
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
*
_________________________________________________________________________________________
BBC NEWS
AUSTRAILIA FIRES WORST IN HISTORY (TEMPERATURE TOPS 119 DEG FAH.
The death toll from bush fires in southern Australia has reached at least 84, the worst in the country's history.
Thousands of firefighters are battling several major fires, and the number of dead is expected to rise as rescue workers reach areas ravaged by fire.
Victoria Premier John Brumby said he had accepted an offer from the federal government to send in the army.
Entire towns have been destroyed in the fires, fanned by extremely high temperatures and unpredictable winds.
Temperatures are dropping now, but officials fear they will not be able to get the fires under control until there is substantial rain.
'Absolutely horrific'
Firefighters have been battling against what are described as the worst conditions in the state's history.
Witnesses described seeing walls of flames four storeys high, trees exploding and the skies raining ash, as fires tore across 30,000 hectares (115 sq miles) of forests, farmland and towns.
The BBC's Nick Bryant in Sydney said police suspect that in at least one case fires have been restarted by arsonists after being extinguished by firefighters.
New South Wales Premier Nathan Rees said arsonists faced a maximum 25 years' jail.
"We will throw the book at you if you are caught," he was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency.
At least 640 homes have been destroyed in Victoria and about 14,000 homes are without power.
Most of the people who died came from a cluster of small towns to the north of Melbourne. The BBC's Phil Mercer in Sydney said many charred bodies had been found in cars. It is thought they were trying to escape the fires but were overtaken by their "sheer speed and ferocity".
At least 12 people died in the town of Kinglake, four at Wandong, four at St Andrews and three at Strathewen.
One Strathewen resident told ABC local radio how people had witnessed "absolutely horrific" scenes as they had helped battle the flames.
"The school's gone, the hall's gone... some people left it too late. We've lost friends, and we're just waiting for more - children, loved ones," she said.
The town of Marysville, with about 500 residents, was said to have been burned to the ground.
Local fire officer Greg Esnouf said: "We're starting to get some reports in now that are very saddening. This latest report says Marysville possibly one building left standing - that's just shocking."
One person was reported dead in Marysville, but most residents managed to shelter from the blaze in a local park.
A survivor from Kinglake, Darren Webb-Johnson, told Sky TV: "The service station went, the take-away store across the road went, cylinders (exploded) left, right and centre, and 80% of the town burnt down to the ground."
'Tragic day'
Tens of thousands of firefighters have been trying to contain blazes in two other states - New South Wales and South Australia - but the fires there were largely contained or burning away from residential areas.
The fire service is using water-bombing aircraft to contain fires and thousands of volunteers are using water hoses.
"It's obviously a tragic day and a tragic week in our history," Mr Brumby said.
Late on Sunday, he said he had accepted an offer from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to send in troops to relieve overstretched emergency crews.
"Hell in all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria in the last 24 hours," said Mr Rudd.
Bush fires are common in Australia, but the current blazes have eclipsed the death toll from what had been the previous worst fire in 1983, when 75 people died on a day that became known as Ash Wednesday.
The leader of the Green party, Bob Brown said summer fires would get worse unless Australia and other nations showed more leadership on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
"It's a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change," he said.
Are you in the area affected by the fires? Tell us your story using the form far below.
Send your pictures to yourpics@bbc.co.uk , text them to +44 7725 100 100 or you have a large file you can upload here .
Read the terms and conditions
At no time should you endanger yourself or others, take any unnecessary risks or infringe any laws.
In most cases a selection of your comments will be published, displaying your name and location unless you state otherwise in the box below.
Name
Your E-mail address
Town & Country
Phone number (optional):
Comments
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7877178.stm
Published: 2009/02/08 10:44:59 GMT
© BBC MMIX
THIS SITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION. |
 |
| Photo by Dobbs |
| Hurricane Ike. |
|
