[s]Blue Skies, no smoke[/s] Fires really bad again!
Cluso99
Posts: 18,069
For the first time in weeks there is blue skies and no smoke 
The fires are still raging about 22km away tho. The firees have done a great job to keep the fires at bay, even tho they cannot put them out. They have been doing back burning whenever possible.
We live on the Central Coast which is about 90km from Sydney. Our suburb (Kariong) is ~1000 houses on smallish blocks of ~600mm2 just off the freeway. Many do the drive to Sydney for work, including our son who lives nearby - his daily work trip is 93km each way and he's been doing that for about 15 years. We are surrounded by bush. Down the hill is the city of Gosford. There is only bush and a small river between us and the fires. Fingers crossed
The fires are still raging about 22km away tho. The firees have done a great job to keep the fires at bay, even tho they cannot put them out. They have been doing back burning whenever possible.
We live on the Central Coast which is about 90km from Sydney. Our suburb (Kariong) is ~1000 houses on smallish blocks of ~600mm2 just off the freeway. Many do the drive to Sydney for work, including our son who lives nearby - his daily work trip is 93km each way and he's been doing that for about 15 years. We are surrounded by bush. Down the hill is the city of Gosford. There is only bush and a small river between us and the fires. Fingers crossed
Comments
But 93km drive each way, every day, for 15 years. Sheer madness! Just like his dad
Didn't you get rid of your boat?
And interesting aside, we’re finding all those enforced password rules - you know, requires those weird ASCII characters (looking at you Apple) - so we complied with others too, are now banning the use of these rarely use ASCII characters, as it seems they can be used to force malware code execution. So we’re now seeing our passwords being rejected by websites, requiring changes to less obtuse characters. Seems full circle!
Fires...
Going to be bad again tomorrow with high 30s and above all over the state. The fires have been back burning containment lines over the past week as the opportunity arose. Here’s hoping they hold. We just have to wait for them to burn out as the front is way too big to extinguish. The burnt area on the map looks to be nearly 200km in diameter!!!
Tomorrow expected to be 26C but back into mid 30s Saturday.
Update: Saturday now forecast to be 47C or 116.6F
We sent the smoke all the way to New Zealand and their snow is now covered in ash!
We have remained safe as the fires have been held at the river.
So far they estimate 8.4M hectares have been burnt. For some perspective, that's 20% of California which is 43M hectares.
We received a large thunderstorm this afternoon that hopefully fell in the fire zone. They need a decent drop or it just hampers back-burning but does nothing to halt the fires. Fortunately not too many lives have been lost thanks to the firefighters. However, many homes and farms have been lost, and lots of sheep and cattle too, and of course wildlife.
The fires are too big to even attempt to extinguish. They are just trying to save property. The fires are expected to burn for at least a couple of months
RossH is somewhere in or near the fires South of Sydney. Hoping he and his family are safe!