Blade Runner 2019: Smoke from terrifying 'ring of fire' turns Sydney's skies apocalypse red
Australians are used to dealing with brutal fire seasons, but barely a week into summer, 2019 is already something else.
Already, 6 lives have been lost and almost 700 homes destroyed by bushfires. The world was briefly captivated by the plight of burned koalas like poor Lewis and the hundreds, possibly thousands, more incinerated in their habitat. Nearly three million hectares either are or have been on fire. More than 11% of New South Wales' national parks have burned, including World Heritage ancient rainforest that's never been dry enough to catch fire until now. Sydney is now in the longest sustained period of hazardous air pollution on record.
As I was flying into Sydney last Tuesday morning, my little cabin window framed the smoke from those fires in the Blue Mountains, as it rose and spread towards the city in a filthy fog, like the ghost of an oil spill. By the time I walked into the Mashable office less than an hour after landing, having walked ten minutes from the train station, my hair stank of smoke.
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The mornings have been a sickly, flat grey; by mid-afternoon, the smoke, ash, and dust from fires to the city's north, west, and south turns the air into a still from Blade Runner.
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We're staring directly into the sun because we can, because its light dulled to a crisp disc of fluorescent red is mesmerising and no iPhone camera can do this Tattooine-sunset weirdness justice. (Sydneysiders keep trying, though.)
As people in the city walk off worksites in protest as air pollution records are broken and buy 3M filter masks in multipacks, thousands of people further out of the city have been living in these conditions and worse for weeks. Millions live in cities with air this hazardous every day.
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(For comparison, the below.)
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But it's not the smoke itself that's truly scary, or the alien sun, or the surreal quality of the light. It's that no matter where we look, the entire sky, the very air we share, is now an inescapable reminder of how bad it can get.
And the suddenness with which this surreal new normal can bear down upon a major city is particularly chilling in a country where the prime minister insists there's no link between fossil fuel use and the unprecedented fire season that's turning his hometown into a sci-fi apocalypse.
Over the weekend, the skies cleared just a little, but the patches of blue were dulled like a crappy Instagram filter; meanwhile, several fire fronts to the north merged to become a fire bigger in area than Sydney itself. Monday found the sky a nauseous grey again.
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Fire services are dreading Tuesday, which promises highs of over 40 degrees Celsius in some parts of NSW.
You can donate to the NSW Rural Fire Service here, and find links to give to the Australian Red Cross and other support organisations here.
Caitlin is Mashable's Australian Editor. She has written for The Guardian, Junkee, and any number of plucky little music and culture publications that were run on the smell of an oily rag and have since been flushed off the Internet like a dead goldfish by their new owners. She also worked at Choice, Australia's consumer advocacy non-profit and magazine, and as such has surprisingly strong opinions about whitegoods. She enjoys big dumb action movies, big clever action movies, cult Canadian comedies set in small towns, Carly Rae Jepsen, The Replacements, smoky mezcal, revenge bedtime procrastination, and being left the hell alone when she's reading.
