Latest Bushfires in Australia Stories

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Despite cooler conditions across southeastern Australia on Wednesday, the threat of wildfires remained a concern throughout the states of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, according to various news reports. Record heat and dry conditions sparked bushfires throughout several regions in recent days, destroying buildings throughout all three Australian states, according to BBC News. The Associated Press (AP) notes that there...

Nearly half of the United States' airborne fire suppression equipment was operating over Colorado on June 25, 2012, CNN reported, as tens of thousands of acres burned. Fires raged in southwestern Colorado, northeastern Colorado, and multiple locations in between. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on June 23, 2012. Red outlines approximate the locations of actively burning fires. The High Park and Weber Fires...

Clearing vegetation close to houses is the best way to reduce impacts of severe bushfires, according to a team of scientists from Australia and the USA who examined house loss after as a result of Black Saturday, when a series of fires raged across the Australian state of Victoria, killing 173 and injuring 414. The research involving 12,000 measurements at 500 houses affected by the Black Saturday fires was only made possible by the sheer size of the devastation of February 7, 2009....

Officials fear Australian could suffer even worse wildfires next summer than the deadly blazes that killed a record 173 people in February, AFP reported.The fire season could be the toughest in a decade, according to Victoria state premier John Brumby.Brumby said the prognosis in terms of this year's fire season is that it's going to be a "very, very tough fire season again.""All of the advice at the moment is that this will be as bad, if not worse, than anything that we've seen in...

Pop star Pink, actress Nicole Kidman and singer Leonard Cohen are among those contributing money to help victims of deadly Australian bushfires.Pink gave $250,000 to a Red Cross appeal set up to aid those impacted by last week's bushfires, which left 200 people dead and destroyed 1,800 homes, the BBC said Tuesday.I've been really affected by the media images of the tragic bushfires in Victoria, Pink said in a posting on her Web site. My heart goes out to all those who have suffered so much in...

Two fires still raging in Northern California LOS ANGELES, July 5 (Xinhua) -- Driven overnight by "sundowner" winds that gusted to 50 mph, two major wildfires were still raging in Northern California on Saturday, charring more land and threatening nearby residents, authorities said. In the city of Goleta, one fire grew to more than 8,300 acres ( about 3,361 hectares), but by Saturday morning was 24 percent contained, fire officials said. The blaze has destroyed four outbuildings and led...

By Jason Webb MADRID (Reuters) - An area the size of New York City was destroyed in forest fires that raged across northwestern Spain this month, sparking accusations of political incompetence and organised arson, an official said on Wednesday. "A very large area has burned, about 70,000 hectares," said Emilio Perez, the Galicia region's head of government, adding that many of the hundreds of fires were started on purpose. The area burned became a political issue when Spain's...

LISBON (Reuters) - Portugal raised its national fire alert to the second highest level on Friday, as rising temperatures and falling humidity threatened to mar a summer fire season that has so far been mild. The authorities said they expect temperatures to rise in the coming days while humidity drops to below 20 percent. "Because of this, between August 4 and 7, we have raised the fire alert level to orange," the National Fire and Forest Institute said on its Web site, referring to the...

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Forest fires in two Canadian provinces have forced the evacuation of at least 5,500 people living in rural and northern communities, officials said on Tuesday. About 3,500 residents of Tumbler Ridge, in the northeast region of the Western Canadian province of British Columbia, were ordered out of their homes late on Monday as a forest fire raged toward the community and crews used heavy equipment and helicopters struggled to control the...

CANBERRA -- Cooler conditions and a little rain calmed deadly bushfires in the Australian state of Victoria on Saturday and allowed weary firefighters to make some headway in their battle, but authorities warned the crisis was not over.Firefighters managed to control one of the four most dangerous blazes -- three of which are less than 100 km (60 miles) from Melbourne, Australia's second-most-populous city -- but the rest are still burning out of control.Hundreds of people have evacuated...