A thick blanket of smoke hangs over parts of the Sydney, Sept. 14, 2023, following New South Wales Rural Fire Service hazard reduction burns in the past week.
Mark Baker/AP
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Mark Baker/AP
A thick blanket of smoke hangs over parts of the Sydney, Sept. 14, 2023, following New South Wales Rural Fire Service hazard reduction burns in the past week.
Mark Baker/AP
SYDNEY — Sydney experienced its first total fire ban in almost three years on Tuesday and several schools along the New South Wales state coast to the south were closed because of a heightened wildfire danger, caused by unusually hot and dry conditions across southeast Australia.
Authorities have forecast the most destructive wildfire season during the approaching Southern Hemisphere summer in Australia’s populous southeast since the catastrophic Black Summer fires of 2019-20 that killed 33 people, destroyed more than 3,000 homes and razed 19 million hectares (47 million acres).
A total fire ban has been declared for the Greater Sydney area and the coastal communities to the south. It is the first such declaration for Sydney, Australia’s most populous city after Melbourne, since late November 2020.
Sydney matched its September maximum temperature record of 34.6 degrees Celsius (94.3 degrees Fahrenheit ) on Tuesday. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology described it as an unusually warm start to spring for much Australia’s southeast.
“We are in this run of very, very warm weather which hasn’t been seen in many, many years,” the bureau’s senior meteorologist Miriam Bradbury said.
Authorities said 61 wildfires were burning across Australia’s most populous state Tuesday, with 13 burning out of control.
Authorities declared a “catast
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