Sydney suffers hottest day in 80 years

SYDNEY - A total fire ban remains in place across the Australian state of New South Wales on Monday, after Sydney residents endured the hottest day in 80 years.

The weekend heat wave saw temperatures reach as high as 47.3 C in Sydney's west, while the rest of the harbor city sizzled at around 41 C to 45 C, making it the hottest place to be anywhere on Earth.

"We had a trough move through central NSW," said Australian Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Jordan Notara.

"And ahead of that trough, we had strong west to northwesterly winds and that tends to drag warm, dry air masses in from central Australia and western NSW."

Other states in the southeast of the country were also forced to suffered through the hellish weather, with conditions in some parts of Victoria so bad on Saturday, a 10-kilometer stretch of the Hume highway began to melt under the scorching summer sun.

As a result, traffic between Sydney and Melbourne was delayed for a number of hours.

People were rushing to the beaches for coolness, keeping lifesavers busy responding to critical situations in the state.

Dozens of wildfires also raged across the southeast over the weekend, with authorities responding to 51 separate fires in NSW alone.

On Monday morning, the sporting world was rocked by the news that the captain of England's cricket team had to be rushed to hospital after battling severe dehydration during the fourth day of the final test match against Australia in Sydney.

The scorcher even forced French tennis player Kristina Mladenovic to retire midway through Sunday's match of the Sydney International tennis tournament.

"Forty-three degrees but probably 50 on court when we started," she said. "I'm sorry to the fans. It's the first time in my career I retired in a match."

Luckily, however, a cool change is on the way, according to Notara.

"We are seeing that trough moving away this morning and we will get a little bit of a reprieve with temperatures of 30 C tomorrow," he said.

But despite the good news, Nortara acknowledged that it's unlikely to be a one-off.

"We expect to see at least one or two more of these extreme days of heat through the summer period," he said.

Xinhua - Ap

(China Daily 01/09/2018 page12)