Tag Archives: Drought

Drought-hit Taiwan plans more water curbs for chip hubs

TAIPEI (Reuters) -Taiwan will tighten curbs on the use of water from June 1 in the major chip making hubs of Hsinchu and Taichung as it battles an island wide drought, if there is no significant rainfall by then, the government said on Wednesday.

Describing the drought as the worst in the island’s history, the economy ministry said in the absence of rain it would raise the drought alert level to its highest, requiring companies in the two science parks to cut water consumption by 17%.

“We need to further tighten water use restrictions in response, in advance of a scenario when rainfall from the plum rain is falling short of expectation,” the ministry said in a statement, referring to the late spring rainy season.

Reservoirs in the island’s central and southern regions were at below 5% of capacity, the ministry said, adding that in its drastic efforts to add supplies it had turned to about 160 wells and seawater desalination plants.

The world’s largest contract chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC), has factories in both Hsinchu and Taichung.

The chip giant told Reuters it had seen no impact on production and would continue to trim its water use and buy supplies from tanker trucks for some foundries.

Another major chipmaker, United Microelectronics Corp, said it had adopted numerous water-saving measures.

“There is no impact to production,” it added.

No typhoons directly hit the island last year, meaning much less rain. This year rainfall has also been low and the outlook is not good.

Technology companies have long complained about tight water supplies, which became more acute after factories expanded production following a Sino-U.S. trade war.

The drought has also exacerbated problems with electricity management, leading to two major island-wide blackouts in less than a week.

President Tsai Ing-wen pledged this week to look into electricity management, saying the booming economy and extreme weather posed a “great challenge”.

The drought means electricity generated by hydropower plants was insufficient, state-run electricity provider Taipower said.

(Reporting by Yimou Lee and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birseland Clarence Fernandez)

Famine looms in southern Madagascar, U.N.’s food agency says

Salem Abdullah Musabih, 6, lies on a bed at a malnutrition intensive care unit at a hospital in the Red Sea port city of Hodaida, Yemen

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – Famine threatens southern Madagascar after drought and sandstorms ruined harvests, reducing people to eating locusts and leaves, the United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP) said on Friday.

The lives of children are in danger, especially those under five years old whose malnutrition rates have reached “alarming levels”, Amer Daoudi, senior director of global WFP operations, said by video link from Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo.

At least 1.35 million people are in need of food assistance in the region, but the WFP is only reaching 750,000 with “half-rations” due to financial constraints, he said.

“Famine looms in southern Madagascar as communities witness an almost total disappearance of food sources which has created a full-blown nutrition emergency,” Daoudi told a U.N. briefing in Geneva.

He said he had visited villages where “people have had to resort to desperate survival measures, such as eating locusts, raw red cactus fruits or wild leaves”.

The harvest was expected to be nearly 40% below the 5-year average, he added.

Malnutrition among children under 5 has almost doubled to 16% from 9% in the four months to March 2021 following five consecutive years of drought, exacerbated this year by sandstorms and late rains, he said.

A rate of 15% is deemed emergency level and some districts are reporting 27%, or one in four children under five, are suffering from acute malnutrition that causes wasting, he said.

“I witnessed…horrific images of starving children, malnourished, and not only the children – mothers, parents and the population in villages we visited,” Daoudi said.

“They are on the periphery of famine, these are images I haven’t seen for quite some time across the globe,” said the veteran aid worker.

WFP is seeking $75 million to cover emergency needs through September, he added.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by William Maclean and Mark Heinrich)

More forced power outages in Taiwan as demand spikes amid heatwave, drought

TAIPEI (Reuters) -Taiwan imposed power cuts on Monday evening following a spike in demand amid a heatwave and drought and failure at a power plant, in the second such outage in a week, although far fewer homes were affected.

Power was restored by 1340 GMT, electricity provider Taipower said.

Taiwan, which major chip makers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC) call home, already imposed phased blackouts on Thursday following an outage at a plant in the southern city of Kaohsiung.

TSMC, which has factories across the island, said it had seen “no impact so far” from Monday’s power cuts.

Taipower said 660,000 homes were affected by the power cuts, fewer than the roughly 4 million affected last week.

Taipower blamed a rise in demand coincided with the suspension of some generators due to a technical failure at the southern Hsinta Power Plant, the same facility that caused the problem last week.

The state-own company said that the worst drought to hit the island in more than half a century meant electricity generated by hydropower plants was insufficient to meet the unexpected demand on Monday evening, a record high for May.

By 8:40 p.m., only 40% of the supply had been restored in the coal- and gas-fired power plant, Taipower said.

Taiwan’s cabinet offered an apology and urged citizens to stay safe.

Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang, said the outages showed the government’s power policy was inadequate and called for Economy Minister Wang Mei-hua to step down.

Taiwan is currently experiencing an unusually hot May with temperatures in parts of the island peaking at around 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).

(Reporting by Yimou Lee and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Gareth Jones, Louise Heavens, Nick Macfie and Raissa Kasolowsky)

As drought dries California rivers, salmon take truck rides to sea

By Sharon Bernstein

GOLD RIVER, Calif. (Reuters) – During a typical spring, the silver young salmon swimming in long tanks at the Nimbus Fish Hatchery east of Sacramento would be released into the American River and then make their way out to the Pacific Ocean to grow to adulthood.

But with extreme drought now gripping California and much of West Coast, the rivers are too warm for the salmon to survive.

This week, the 3.5-inch (90-mm) smolt, as the young fish are known, embarked on a much different journey when they were loaded on to trucks and driven to the San Francisco Bay for release into cooler waters.

Low amounts of rain and snow led to less water and warmer temperatures in the state’s rivers and reservoirs, said Jason Julienne, who manages several state-run hatcheries in the Sacramento River system, including the Nimbus.

When those conditions occur, “we know we have to really go into high gear to make sure these fish survive,” said Harry Morse, spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The state plans to truck 17 million of the smolt to the San Francisco Bay this year from various hatcheries, an emergency step not taken since the last major drought in 2014, Morse said.

On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency for 41 of the state’s 58 counties, including the major watersheds relied on by salmon and other wildlife.

Droughts in California are growing more frequent and more intense as climate change continues, threatening the state’s already tenuous supply of water for wildlife, farmers and urban areas, and creating conditions ripe for dangerous wildfires.

Other portions of the West Coast are also experiencing severe drought. In Oregon, federal officials said on Wednesday that a portion of water from the Klamath River system would not be available to farmers, and that additional protections for salmon and other fish were under consideration.

Even without drought and climate change, salmon and other fish were struggling to survive on the West Coast, as water projects such as dams and reservoirs inhibit their ability to migrate to the sea and back, a natural part of their life cycle that can take about three years.

Two species of Chinook salmon are considered endangered on the West Coast, and seven are considered threatened under the Endangered Species Act, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In the American River in California where the Nimbus smolt are usually released, water from rain and snow was flowing at just 31% of its average rate on Tuesday, according to state data. The resulting warmer water has created a desperate situation not only for the fish at the hatchery, but for the hundreds of thousands of fry and eggs laid naturally in the rivers themselves.

“My biggest fear is that each and every egg that is laid this year is going to die because the temperatures in the rivers are going to be too high,” said Mike Conroy, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations.

His organization is asking the state and federal agencies that apportion water from a complex system of reservoirs to make sure that sufficient cool water is released to prevent the rivers from becoming toxic to young fish, Conroy said.

But others – including a California agricultural sector that produces a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts – also rely on that water. As more water is reserved for fish, less is available to irrigate farms and for the state’s 40 million residents.

“The pull of one wrong lever can throw the whole system out of whack,” said Conroy. “It has to be carefully balanced.”

(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Lisa Shumaker)

Nervous North American farmers set to ‘seed in faith’ into parched soils

By Rod Nickel and Julie Ingwersen

WINNIPEG, Manitoba/CHICAGO (Reuters) – Fields across the Canadian Prairies and the U.S. Northern Plains are among the driest on record, raising production risks in one of the world’s key growing regions for canola and spring wheat.

As planting season begins, the dusty soils generate fears that seeds will fail to germinate or yield smaller crops in a year when demand for canola already far outstrips supply. Unusually strong wheat exports to China for animal feed have also lowered global supplies of the main ingredient in bread and pasta.

Prices of canola, which is processed into vegetable oil and animal feed, hit all-time highs in February and Canadian supplies look to dwindle by midsummer to an eight-year low.

Spring wheat futures are trading near their highest levels since 2017, the last time significant drought gripped the northern U.S. Plains.

“I guess we seed in faith, hoping it’s going to rain,” said Steven Donald, 41, a fourth-generation member of a family-owned grain and cattle farm near Moosomin, Saskatchewan. “It’s the driest that we can remember.”

Donald’s fields are powder-dry. His pastures crunch under his boots and contain gaping cracks.

In eastern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, a dry winter followed scant rainfall during the last growing season, said Bruce Burnett, director of markets and weather at Glacier FarmMedia.

Much of western Manitoba had the driest or close to the driest winter in more than a century of records, according to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada data. Most of arable Manitoba and southern Saskatchewan faces severe to extreme drought, the federal department said on Friday.

Many farmers are adjusting by scaling back canola plantings, said Neil Townsend, FarmLink Marketing Solutions’ chief market analyst, citing surveys. Canola is especially vulnerable to drought that can prevent seeds from germinating.

RECORD-BREAKING DRYNESS IN NORTH DAKOTA

Across the border in North Dakota, the top U.S. spring wheat producer, the last six months have been the driest in records dating to 1895, said Adnan Akyuz, the state’s official climatologist. The latest weekly U.S. Drought Monitor showed 70% of North Dakota in “extreme drought,” up from 47% the previous week.

The Drought Monitor shows a better outlook for corn and soybeans, the main U.S. cash crops, mostly grown farther south.

Rain and snow are expected in North Dakota this week, according to meteorologist Greg Gust with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But it is unlikely to amount to much relief, although showers are possible in the 16-30-day period, said Joel Widenor, agriculture meteorologist with the Commodity Weather Group. Most of the state’s wheat crop is planted in late April and May.

Statistics Canada will issue its first report on planting intentions on April 27. Farmers are likely to seed 4% more canola, mainly in northern areas with more soil moisture, Agriculture Canada said on March 18.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture last month projected that North Dakota farmers would plant 7 million acres of soybeans, making it the state’s most-planted crop, while spring wheat acres would fall 2% to 5.6 million.

Soil erosion is a concern as winds whip the region, said Jim Peterson of the North Dakota Wheat Commission. As a result, wheat may lose more acres to soybeans, which farmers can plant into June without stirring up fields to apply fertilizer, he said.

Conditions are the driest that Minto, Manitoba, farmer Jake Ayre and his family have seen since emigrating to Canada from England in 2002. But most planting in the region, known for its volatile weather, occurs in May.

“We’re not panicking,” Ayre said. “My dad said, ‘We’re always three weeks away from a drought, three weeks away from a flood.'”

(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg and Julie Ingwersen in Chicago; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Record California wildfires burn over four million acres

By Adrees Latif

NAPA, Calif. (Reuters) – Wildfires in California have burned more than 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares) in 2020, over twice the previous record for any year and an area larger than Connecticut, the state’s fire agency reported on Sunday.

The most-populous U.S. state has suffered five of its six largest wildfires in history this year as heat waves and dry-lightning sieges coincided with drier conditions that climate scientists blame on global warming.

At least 31 people have died in this year’s fires and over 8,454 homes and other structures have been destroyed, Cal Fire said in a statement.

California’s previous record burn area was nearly 2 million acres in 2018 when the state had its most deadly and destructive wildfire that killed at least 85 civilians and destroyed nearly 19,000 structures in and around the mountain town of Paradise.

“There’s no words to describe what is taking place and what continues to take place,” said Cal Fire spokesman Scott McLean. “It goes to show how dry the state is and how volatile the vegetation is.”

California suffered a prolonged drought from around 2010 to 2017, causing diseases and insect infestations that killed millions of trees. That followed a century of fire suppression that also built up brush and dead trees, turning some forests into tinderboxes.

City real-estate prices and second-home construction have seen the growth of communities in peripheral, wildland areas that have naturally burned for millennia.

In the world-famous wine country of Napa County, the so-called Glass Fire has damaged over a dozen wineries. Vineyards worked through the night on Saturday to pick grape varieties that can resist smoke damage. Some crops heavily exposed to smoke may be a write-off.

Firefighters were expected to get a break from cooler temperatures in Northern California this week, with a chance of rain, Cal Fire said.

(Reporting by Adrees Latif; Additional reporting and writing by Andrew Hay; Editing by Peter Cooney)

‘All gone:’ Residents return to burned-out Oregon towns as many West Coast wildfires keep burning

By Adrees Latif and Patrick Fallon

TALENT, Ore. (Reuters) – Search-and-rescue teams, with dogs in tow, were deployed across the blackened ruins of southern Oregon towns on Sunday as smoldering wildfires still ravaged U.S. Pacific Coast states after causing widespread destruction.

A blitz of wildfires across Oregon, California and Washington has destroyed thousands of homes and a half dozen small towns this summer, scorching more than 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares) and killing more than two dozen people since early August.

Tracy Koa, a high school teacher, returned to Talent, Oregon, on Saturday after evacuating with her partner, Dave Tanksle, and 13-year-old daughter to find her house and neighborhood reduced to heaps of ash and rubble.

“We knew that it was gone,” Koa said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “But then you pull up, and the devastation of just every home, you think of every family and every situation and every burnt-down car, and there are just no words for it.”

Crews in Jackson County, Oregon, where Talent is located, were hoping to venture into rural areas where the Almeda Fire has abated slightly with slowing winds, sending up thick plumes of smoke as the embers burned. From Medford through the neighboring communities of Phoenix and Talent, an apocalyptic scene of charred residential subdivisions and trailer parks stretched for miles along Highway 99.

Community donation centers popped up around Jackson County over the weekend, including one in the parking lot of Home Depot in Phoenix, where farmers brought a pickup truck bed full of watermelons and people brought water and other supplies.

Farther north in Clackamas County, Dane Valentine, 28, showed a Reuters journalist the remains of his house.

“This is my home,” he said. “Yep. All gone.”

Down the road, a woman with a Trump 2020 sign on her home, pointed a shotgun at the journalist and shouted at him to leave.

“You’re the reason they’re setting fires up here,” she said, perhaps referring to false rumors that left-wing activists had sparked the wildfires.

After four days of brutally hot, windy weather, the weekend brought calmer winds blowing inland from the Pacific Ocean, and cooler, moister conditions that helped crews make headway against blazes that had burned unchecked last week.

Still, emergency officials worried that the shifting weather might not be enough to quell the fires.

“We’re concerned that the incoming front is not going to provide a lot of rain here in the Medford region and it’s going to bring increased winds,” Bureau of Land Management spokesman Kyle Sullivan told Reuters in a telephone interview on Sunday.

At least 10 people have been killed in Oregon, according to the office of emergency management. Oregon Governor Kate Brown has said dozens of people remain missing across three counties.

There were 34 active fires burning in Oregon as of Sunday morning, according to the state’s office of emergency management website.

CLIMATE CHANGE ‘WAKE-UP CALL’

Thick smoke and ash from the fires have darkened skies over the Pacific Northwest since Labor Day last Monday, creating some of the world’s worst air-quality levels and driving residents indoors. Satellite images showed the smoke was wafting inland in an easterly direction, the Bureau of Land Management said on Twitter on Sunday.

Drought conditions, extreme temperatures and high winds in Oregon created the “perfect firestorm” for the blazes to grow, Brown told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“This is a wake-up call for all of us that we’ve got to do everything in our power to tackle climate change,” the Democratic governor said.

President Donald Trump was scheduled to travel to California and meet with federal and state officials on Monday. He has said that Western governors bear some of the blame for intense fire seasons in recent years, as opposed to warming temperatures, and has accused them of poor forest management.

In California, evacuations were ordered for the northern tip of the San Gabriel Valley suburb of Arcadia as the Bobcat Fire threatened communities.

At Wilderness Park in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, firefighters prepared to stave off the blaze as it worked its way downhill.

Steep terrain and dry hills that have not burned for 60 years are providing fuel for the blaze, which started over the Labor Day weekend.

As the smoke that has been clogging the air and blocking heat from the sun begins to lift, firefighters expect the weather to heat up and fire activity could increase, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.

All told in California, nearly 17,000 firefighters were battling 29 major wildfires on Sunday, Cal Fire said.

Improving weather conditions had helped them gain a measure of containment over blazes in many parts of the state, and some evacuated residents in Madera County near where the massive Creek Fire was burning, were allowed to go back home.

More than 4,000 homes and other structures have been incinerated in California alone over the past three weeks. About 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) of land have been burned in the state, according to Cal Fire.

(Reporting by Adrees Latif in Ashland, Oregon, and Patrick Fallon in Arcadia, California; Additional reporting by Sharon Bernstein, Gabriella Borter, Dan Whitcomb, Doina Chiacu, Shannon Stapleton and Aishwarya Nair; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Nick Zieminski and Peter Cooney)

‘Worse than combat:’ Helicopters rescue hundreds from California wildfire

By Andrew Hay

(Reuters) – U.S. military helicopters on Tuesday plucked dozens more campers, hikers and locals from the path of a raging California wildfire, with one pilot describing conditions as more dangerous than combat.

California Army National Guard Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters were flying into dense smoke, sometimes landing within 50 feet of flames while an extreme wildfire burned through a dead forest in Central California.

Pilots and crews were packing aircraft with burn victims and evacuees, rescuing about 100 people on Tuesday, said Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Shiroma.

Crews have airlifted around 360 people and 16 dogs since the Creek Fire, the cause of which is under investigation, in mountains 35 miles northeast of Fresno on Saturday.

Kipp Goding landed multiple times at a campsite where people gathered on a lake dock as everything around them burned, filling his UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter to capacity.

“Every piece of vegetation you could see as far as you could see around that lake was on fire,” Goding, an Army National Guard pilot, said on a video call.

He told two people on his last landing that it was their final chance to go, but they chose to stay with their motor homes.

Two helicopter pilots have died since mid-August fighting wildfires in California and Oregon and Goding said the missions were worse than getting shot at in combat.

“The added stress and workload of going in and out of that fire is definitely by far the toughest flying I’ve ever done,” said Goding, who has flown 25 years for the Army.

A decade-long drought allowed beetles to kill around 90 percent of trees in the Sierra National Forest area. Rising average temperatures, combined with recent heat waves, parched ground vegetation, creating optimal fire conditions.

Pilots are flying at night using night vision goggles to see through dense smoke that during the daytime can make missions impossible.

“Those night vision goggles allowed us to keep on going one ridge further,” Goding said.

(Reporting by Andrew Hay; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Peter Cooney)

Australia’s bushfire-stricken east welcomes drenching rain

By Lidia Kelly

MELBOURNE (Reuters) – Intense thunderstorms with heavy rains dampened bushfires on Australia’s east coast on Friday, to the relief of exhausted firefighters and farmers battling years of drought, and granting a reprieve to the organisers of next week’s Australian Open.

Australia, famous for its pristine beaches and wildlife, has been fighting bushfires since September, with fires killing 29 people and millions of animals, and destroying more than 2,500 homes while razing an area roughly a third the size of Germany.

Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, three of the states most affected by drought and bushfires welcomed this week’s drenching rain, with fire services saying it would not extinguish all the blazes, but would greatly aid containment.

“Our fingers are crossed that this continues over the coming days,” New South Wales fire services said on Twitter on Friday.

Severe storms are forecast to continue in many fire-stricken regions of New South Wales and Queensland, including areas that have not seen heavy falls for years, weather officials in New South Wales said, slightly easing a three-year drought.

“The recent rain has just been absolutely fantastic,” said cattle farmer Sam White near the northern town of Guyra in New South Wales.

“It’s producing significant amounts of runoff, which is what we need, and it’s getting into our dams.”

While the wet weather brings relief to fire fighters and drought-hit farmers, it also comes with dangers, such as flash flooding and falling trees. One wildlife park had to rescue koalas from floodwaters and beat back crocodiles with brooms.

The heavy downpours have helped to clean smoky air in Australia, but Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne remained in the world’s top 100 polluted cities on Friday, a pollution ranking by AirVisual showed.

Melbourne, shrouded this week in thick smoke that disrupted the Australian Open qualifying matches and other competitions, is forecast to again be blanketed by unhealthy air over the weekend, before the Grand Slam begins in earnest on Monday.

But fears the smoke would return on Saturday for the final round of qualifying eased on Friday, when the Environmental Protection Agency forecast air quality in the Melbourne area would be “moderate” rather than “very poor”.

The smoke haze plaguing Australia’s major cities for weeks has been tracked by NASA circumnavigating the globe and the space agency’s satellites showed on Thursday there was also a large concentration of lower smoke over the Pacific Ocean.

Here are key events in the bushfire crisis:

* Early on Friday, 82 fires were burning across New South Wales, 30 uncontained, and several in Victoria, fire authorities said.

* An emergency evacuation order was issued for parts of Victoria’s northeast, with an out-of-control bushfire threatening the Buffalo River Valley.

* Firefighters, family and the community of Holbrook in New South Wales bade farewell to Samuel McPaul, a 28-year-old volunteer who died in December while fighting a massive and fast-moving blaze.

* Australia will have to wait until March for rains heavy enough to bring sustained relief from dry weather that has fuelled the bushfires, the weather bureau said.

* Top tourism body estimates the bushfire crisis has cost the Australian industry almost A$1 billion ($690 million). [L4N29L069]

* Players’ complaints about pollution blighted qualifying rounds of the Australian Open in Melbourne, the year’s first tennis Grand Slam.

 

(Reporting by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Michael Perry and Clarence Fernandez)

Australian authorities scramble to reach victims of deadly fires as death toll rises

By Colin Packham

SYDNEY (Reuters) – A third person was confirmed dead on Wednesday in devastating bushfires that engulfed Australia’s southeast coast this week and a fourth was missing and feared dead, as navy ships rushed to provide supplies and assist with evacuations.

At least 15 people are now believed to have died, while scores of people remain missing after weeks of fires that have ripped through Australia’s east coast, much of which is tinder-dry after three years of drought.

Fanned by soaring temperatures, columns of fire and smoke blackened entire towns on Monday and Tuesday, forcing thousands of residents and holidaymakers to seek shelter on beaches. Many stood in shallow water to escape the flames.

Bushfires have destroyed more than 4 million hectares (10 million acres) and new blazes are sparked almost daily by extremely hot and windy conditions and, most recently, dry lightning strikes created by the fires themselves.

Cooler conditions on Wednesday gave the country a moment to count the cost of the fires, although there were still more than 100 blazes in New South Wales (NSW) state alone and thousands of firefighters on the ground.

The body of a man was found in a burnt car early on Wednesday on the south coast of New South Wales after emergency workers began reaching the most damaged areas, and police said the death toll will rise.

“Sadly, we can report today that police have confirmed a further three deaths as a result of the fires on the South Coast,” NSW Police Deputy Commissioner Gary Worboys told reporters in Sydney.

“Police are also at Lake Conjola now, where a house has been destroyed by fire and the occupant of that home is still unaccounted for.”

NSW police did not identify the missing man but said he was 72 years old and authorities have been unable to reach his home.

Police said early assessments have found nearly 200 homes have been destroyed, though they cautioned it was an early estimate.

In Victoria state, four people remain missing, state Premier Daniel Andrews said, after a massive blaze ripped through Gippsland – a rural region about 500 km (310 miles) east of Melbourne.

About 4,000 people in the town of Mallacoota in Victoria headed to the waterfront after the main road was cut off.

Mark Tregellas, a resident of Mallacoota who spent the night on a boat ramp, said only a late shift in the wind direction sparred lives.

“The fire just continued to grow and then the black started to descend. I couldn’t see the hand in front in my face, and it then it started to glow red and we knew the fire was coming,” Tregellas told Reuters.

“Ash started to fall from the air and then the embers started to come down. At that point, people started to bring their kids and families into the water. Thankfully, the wind changed and the fire moved away.”

Thousands of Australians remain cut off as fires force the closure of major roads, leaving many struggling to secure supplies.

In Milton, a small town on the on the NSW south coast, locals queued for hours for the few remaining items left of shelves on supermarkets.

Emma Schirmer, who evacuated from her house in Batemans Bay with her three-month child on Tuesday, said the local shop was limiting sales to six items per customer, while a power outage meant shoppers could pay only with cash.

As shops run low and firefighters struggle with exhaustion, Australia’s military, including Black Hawk helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft and naval vessels were being deployed.

Victoria’s emergency management commissioner, Andrew Crisp, said the 176-metre-long HMAS Choules may be used to evacuate many of those stranded in Mallacoota, though with a capacity of 1,000 it will be insufficient alone.

HMAS Choules is due to arrive on Thursday.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said authorities were working to restore communications with areas cut off by the fires, though she warned conditions will deteriorate again over the weekend.

“Weather conditions on Saturday will be as bad as they were” on Tuesday, Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney.

Meanwhile, Australia’s capital Canberra was blanketed in thick smoke, reaching about 20 times hazardous levels, prompting health warnings.

The smoke has also drifted to New Zealand where it has turned the daytime sky orange across the South Island.

(Reporting by Colin Packham in Sydney; Editing by Cynthia Osterman, Kim Coghill and Louise Heavens)