Fears rise for homeless and vulnerable people as communities brace for another week of relentless hot weather
A sign warns bathers of the extreme heat on Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia. Photograph: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images
It was 48.9C (120F) last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests makes solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”
It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.
Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot.
‘It’s like hell here’: Australia bakes as record temperatures nudge 50C by Namaan Zhou, Observer/Guardian, Jan 19, 2019
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Posted by John Hartz on Saturday, 19 January, 2019
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