SYDNEY (AFP): Thousands of tourists have been given less than 48 hours to evacuate fire-ravaged coastal communities as Australia braces for a weekend heatwave expected to fan deadly bushfires. Catastrophic blazes ripped through the country’s south-east on New Year’s Eve, killing at least eight people and stranding holidaymakers.
The New South Wales Rural Fire Service on Thursday declared a “tourist leave zone” stretching about 200km from the popular holiday spot of Batemans Bay along the picturesque coast to neighbouring Victoria state, where people are also being urged to flee.
That weather will create conditions officials say will be as bad as – if not worse than – Tuesday , the deadliest day in a months-long bushfire crisis. "The conditions on Saturday are likely to be worse than New Year's Eve and a lot of those areas in the south-east quadrant of the state have the potential to be impacted — and impacted very heavily," ABC quoted him as saying.
"The message is we’ve got so much fire in that area, we have no capacity to contain these fires, ” he told ABC.John Steele, 73, who lives outside the south coast town of Merimbula, told AFP some people were “panicking” amid the warnings to evacuate. The number of homes confirmed destroyed in recent days has topped 400, with that figure expected to rise as firefighters reach communities still isolated by flames.
“Today it’s starting to move potentially the tourists in Mallacoota, and residents who may not want to be there, ” he said. This season’s blazes have destroyed more than 1,300 homes and scorched over 5.5 million hectares across the country – an area far greater than Denmark or the Netherlands.
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