SYDNEY: Australia’s southeast on Saturday sweltered in a heat wave that raised the risk of bushfires and led authorities to issue fire bans for large parts of Victoria state.

Australia faces a high-risk bushfire season that has already seen Victorian authorities battle a large fire that last week ripped through the state’s vast Grampians National Park, razing homes and farmland.

The nation’s weather forecaster said temperatures would be up to 14 degrees Celsius (25.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above average in some areas, with Melbourne, the capital of Australia’s second most populous state Victoria, set to hit 37 C (98.6 F).

At Melbourne Airport, the temperature was already 32.8 C (91 F) at 10:20am local time, more than six degrees above the January mean maximum temperature, according to forecaster data.

Total fire bans were in place for two districts in Victoria’s west, including Wimmera, an area stretching more than 180 km (111 miles), where authorities labelled the fire danger as “extreme”, the highest danger rating.

“The more significant wind change that is driving the heat across the southeast is not due until Sunday night,” Bureau of Meteorology official Miriam Bradbury told Australian Broadcasting Corp television.

The country’s last few fire seasons have been quiet compared with the catastrophic 2019-2020 “Black Summer” of wildfires that destroyed an area the size of Turkiye and killed 33 people.

Published in Dawn, January 5th, 2025