Locals watch as bushfires impact on farmland near the small town of Nana Glen, some 600kms north of Sydney. — AFP photo
SYDNEY: Bushfires raging across eastern Australia yesterday singed the Sydney suburbs, where firefighters were forced to scramble planes and helicopters to splatter a built-up neighbourhood with water and red retardant.
Twin blazes in the north shore suburb of Turramurra — around 15 kilometres from the centre of Australia’s largest city — tore through a eucalypt forest park and sparked spot fires in homes, before eventually being brought under control.
As night fell, the authorities said they were bringing another ‘clearly suspicious’ blaze in a national park in the city’s southern suburbs under control.
Throughout the day more than 300 bushfires burned up and down Australia’s east coast, fanned by gale-force winds, scorching temperatures and tinder-dry bushland that has brought some of the most dangerous conditions the country has seen.
A firefighter doses a bushfire in the residential area of Sydney. — AFP photo
In Sydney’s Turramurra, gardens smouldered, thick smoke hung heavy in the air and cars, houses and roads were caked in raspberry-red retardant as if hit by a giant paintball.
“It was the embers that floated up that actually went across and set off spot fires in the front yards” resident Nigel Lush told AFP, adding that one roof had been set alight.
Another resident, Julia Gretton-Roberts, said the blaze spread shockingly quickly.
“Next thing I know the fire was opposite our house and it was massive and the police came and grabbed our kids and took them away,” she said. “My daughter is pretty freaked out.”
Firefighter Andrew Connon told AFP “a number of homes were threatened but it was contained by the aerial bombing”.
From early morning thousands of firefighters spread out across New South Wales in anticipation of what they called ‘off the scale’ fire risk and ‘catastrophic’ conditions.
They were unable to prevent several bushfires from breaching containment lines and trapping residents who had not already evacuated.
New South Wales Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said so far only a dozen buildings had been damaged yesterday and a handful non-life-threatening injuries were reported, but the crisis was far from over.
Firefighters will be “working on these fires for days and weeks given the enormity of the firegrounds,” he said.
Experts have described the conditions as the worst on record, as spring temperatures climbed toward 40 degrees Celsius and winds topped 80 kilometres per hour across a zone which has been plagued by persistent drought. — AFP