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Fire Season in Australia Starts, Early and Ominous
Though experts do not think that this season will be the worst yet, they also warn that the past is no longer a reliable guide to the future.
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Helicopters help douse flames in Perth as Western Australia deals with a heat wave. CreditCredit...By ABC Australia By Yan Zhuang
Published Nov. 26, 2023Updated Nov. 27, 2023
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The warmest winter on record, followed by an unusually warm and dry spring. Hundreds of fires along Australia’s east coast, including one that razed 53 homes in Queensland. And last week, on the west coast, a raging blaze just over a dozen miles from the Perth city center was fueled by an unseasonably early heat wave and strong winds.
By Sunday, firefighters had contained the Perth fire, which had burned through about 4,500 acres, destroyed 18 homes and forced dozens of people to evacuate.
It is not yet summer, but Australia’s fire season is well underway, in the latest example of how climate change is altering the rhythms of life across the Earth. Stoked by the El Ni？o weather pattern, it is the first dry and hot year since the summer of 2019-2020. It is expected to be the worst fire season since that period, when nearly 500 people died from direct fire exposure and smoke inhalation, and tens of thousands of acres were charred.
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Yan Zhuang is a reporter in The New York Times's Australia bureau, based in Melbourne. More about Yan Zhuang
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 27, 2023, Section A , Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Ominous Start to Australia’s Fire Season . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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