Aid to Aussie Fire Evacuees

CNN and COLlive

Australian residents lived in fear of a “megafire” Monday as dozens of bush blazes threaten to converge after already consuming thousands of hectares of land.

Officials also warned that a smoke cloud over Sydney may affect residents’ health, as the broken promise of rain may make firefighters’ already daunting task more difficult.

“The fuel bed is very, very dry. We’ve had a series of high wind, high temperature, low humidity days. That causes fires to run quite hard. For instance, the fire that started last Thursday ran 35 kilometers in one day,” said Stuart Midgely, a New South Wales Rural Fire Service incident controller and the top coordinator for the Blue Mountains blaze.

As Wednesday promises more wind and higher temperatures, crews are working “to get containment lines in as deep as we can before that bad weather comes back and potentially blows the fires back up again,” he said.

The fires are swallowing up large areas of bush in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, where authorities have declared a state of emergency. More than 200 homes have been damaged or destroyed, and the fire has had a devastating impact on thousands of people.

Chabad North Shore has opened their premises to house people who are in dire need of a place to stay as a temporary home. 40 bedrooms are ready and available to accommodate those in need, said Rabbi Nochum Schapiro of Chabad North Shore.

“There are a number of people who have already arrived today, among them a mother and two young children who have been forced to evacuate,” said Schapiro. “She said with tears, ‘You don’t know how much this means to me!’ We are in contact with more people in the area who may need to evacuate in the near future if things take a turn for the worse.”

Chabad North Shore has launched an appeal to help them accommodate evacuated people and make their stay as comfortable as possible. To make a tax deductible donation please click here.

“We pray that G-d Almighty has mercy and brings a swift end to this terrible catastrophe, comforts the bereaved and heals the wounded,” Schapiro said.