Sydney, Australia, Feb 14 (EFE).- A farmer died amid extreme weather in the southern Australian state of Victoria, authorities announced Wednesday.
Road closures around power lines from collapsed transmission towers across a road at Anakie in Melbourne, Australia 14 February 2024. EFE-EPA/CON CHRONIS AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND OUT
Preliminary information suggests that a 50-year-old man, who was driving his tractor during a storm in the rural town of Mirboo North, about 150 kilometers (93 miles) east of Melbourne, was hit by flying debris, Victoria’s Emergency Management Commisioner Rick Nugent said.
The extreme weather marked by temperatures of almost 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) was accompanied on Tuesday by storms and strong winds of more than 120 kilometers per hour (75 miles per hour), which also downed trees and left more than half a million homes and businesses without electricity in the state, the second most populated in Australia.
More than 220,000 homes and businesses remained without power on Wednesday, according to state authorities.
The extreme weather was also conducive to the start and spread of several bushfires in Victoria, including those in Stapylton and Pomonal, located in the Grampians National Park, about 250 kilometers northwest of the regional capital, Melbourne.
In Pomonal, where several homes are believed to have been burned, authorities on Wednesday were assessing the damage caused by the fires, Nugent said at a press conference in Melbourne.
In other towns in Victoria, residents and authorities are carrying out cleaning tasks and assessing the damage caused, especially by fallen trees, which have cut off several roads.
The recent extreme weather is reminiscent of the fires of the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, also known as Black Summer, which claimed the lives of 33 people on the country’s east coast, burned some 3,000 homes and around 180,000 square kilometers (69,498 square miles) of land.
The worst fires experienced in the Oceania country in recent decades occurred in early February 2009 in Victoria, where they caused 173 deaths and 414 injured, while destroying an area of 4,500 square kilometers.
The fire season in Australia, one of the world’s largest polluters per capita and among the countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis, varies depending on the area and weather conditions, although they are generally recorded in summer, between the months of December and March. EFE
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