PADevastating bushfires have been ravaging parts of Australia since September, and now the fires have grown so big they’re even generating new weather patterns.
The bushfires’ severity have left computer programs used to predict the path of the fires no longer working as the fires are creating their own weather.
The New South Wales Rural Fire Service has been regularly running computer models to predict how the fires but found that by Thursday they had underestimated its movements.
According to local officials, the scale and unpredictability has reached what they describe as ‘an absolute worst case scenario’.
PexelsAndy Gillham, from the Bairnsdale incident control team in Gippsland, Victoria, told ABC News that in coming days some communities would have fires approaching ‘from almost all directions’.
He added:
Everybody’s saying the same thing; and that is that a lot of the scientific modelling that we use to try and predict where fire might run is not coping with what’s happening in the landscape just purely because of the fire load.
We know roughly what’s happening but the fires are basically doing what they want in the landscape.
With the bushfires being more unpredictable than ever, officials are advising people to leave and find their nearest evacuation centre.
Gillham said there’s ‘no sugar coating on this’ and that there is ‘no safe place, but there are safer places’.
The crew from Fire and Rescue NSW Station 509 Wyoming recorded this video showing the moment their truck was overrun by the bushfire burning South of Nowra. The crew was forced to shelter in their truck as the fire front passed through. #NSWFires #ProtectTheIrreplaceable pic.twitter.com/Hb0yVrefi9
— Fire and Rescue NSW (@FRNSW) December 31, 2019
It’s thought that over half a billion animals have died in the horrific fires which began back in September.
Australian vets are having to make the heartbreaking decision to euthanise many animals to stop the suffering they’re enduring from bushfire injuries.
Wildlife Victoria boss Megan Davidson made the following comments on the ongoing tragedy:
The fires will have killed millions of animals … mammals, birds, reptiles.
[…] It is largely a job of euthanasing at this stage, both livestock and wildlife. They are so severely burned that there is nothing better you can do than end their suffering.
Entire species are now facing a greater threat of extinction, with environmentalists expressing concerns about the nationally-endangered eastern bristlebird. With only three populations of the small bird in Australia, two are under threat.
PAThe bushfires aren’t only affecting Australian residents and animals; the fires have been causing plumes of caramel coloured haze in neighbouring country New Zealand causing glaciers to become a sandy shade of beige instead of white.
Some people have even gone as far to say that they can smell the smoke from there.
Sadly, it doesn’t seem the fires will be clearing anytime soon with New South Wales now in a ‘state of emergency’.
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via [email protected]
Niamh Shackleton is a pint sized person and journalist at UNILAD. After studying Multimedia Journalism at the University of Salford, she did a year at Caters News Agency as a features writer in Birmingham before deciding that Manchester is (arguably) one of the best places in the world, and therefore moved back up north. She’s also UNILAD’s unofficial crazy animal lady.