Accompanying Bushfires
See also: 2008-09 Australian bushfire season and Black Saturday bushfiresAfter a slow start to the 2008-09 Australian bushfire season, the high temperatures and wind precipitated several bushfires across Victoria and South Australia. The conditions were very similar to the heat wave experienced in early January 1939, which killed 438 people and precipitated the Black Friday bushfires of 1939.
Fires were also started in the Australian Alps by lightning strikes from dry thunderstorms in north-east Victoria and south-east New South Wales.
The tail end of the heat wave also precipitated the Black Saturday bushfires, in which 173 people died, 414 injured and 2,029 houses destroyed at various locations across the state. Several locations around the state recorded their highest temperatures since records began in 1859 and winds gusted up to 110 km/h.
Read more about this topic: Early 2009 Southeastern Australia Heat Wave
Famous quotes containing the word accompanying:
“Though I had not come a-hunting, and felt some compunctions about accompanying the hunters, I wished to see a moose near at hand, and was not sorry to learn how the Indian managed to kill one. I went as reporter or chaplain to the hunters,—and the chaplain has been known to carry a gun himself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)