COUNTRYSIDE SEARED BY HEAT

Chronicle (Levin), 30 January 1947, Page 5

COUNTRYSIDE SEARED BY HEAT

— Press Association

By Telegraph

Received Wednesday, 8.50 p.m. SYDNEY, January 29. Tlie scorched inland areas of New South Wales with temperatures sottring well above the eentury, are now heing seared by blistering tvesterly gales and ehoked by stifling dust slorms. More than twenty oilt-back' towns i'rom the Murray River to the Queensland boi'der, report blazing lieat today with parched eountryside and dying stock. In Sydney uncomfortably clammy conditions are due to a freak humidity which has hovered in the nineties all day. Moisture is forming in a dense-fog which blankets some harbourside areas. Eroken Hill has had 15 days with a temperature over 100 and Ihe whole town is under a pall of dust besown by fierce winds. Canowindra reports 14 days with the temperature between 100 and 111. Mosquitoes, flies and dust add to the diseomfort aua tlie town has exhausted its beer supplies. Walgett's temperature has been near 110 for six days. The eonntry is bare of feed and the river Namoi is a string of small waterboles. These are a few of the reports, all of which are distressingly similar. it was estimated today that droughts iu New South Wales since last Jttly have eost the export trade nearly a million lamhs. Monsoonal rains needed for a good beef sea^on in Queensland and the North ern Territory, are six weeks overdltc. A spark from a steam-rollef in the Mount Cole State Forest, Victoria, started a fire which swept 3000 acres of trees and grasslands. The thames sometimes travellcgl at 80 miles all hour but were ehecked today by a foree of 300 men. Visitors to Cotter RiVer near Canberra, are eatehifig trotlt Avi^h their hatids becattse thq prplonged heat-wave is warming even the deepest pools and foroing the gasping fish to the surface. • Coastal cyclonic rains have brought substantial relief to so.me of the more importanf bntter areas but no relief at all to the big milk produeitig districts. Conditions in the pastpral country are now particularly bad, feed having completeiy disappeared ih many districts. Meanwhile the affermath of the floods in Queensland and NewSouth Wales is serious. Residents of Waterford, 22 miles soiith of Erisbane, iiumbering 141, are marooned withoiit food in a schoolhouse. A relief launch may get thrbugh today. Most h'omes, the store and telephone exchange are submerged. Buses are getting through to Tweed Heads and Brisbane but the bridges and rail way lines are heavily damaged. . j