Australia fires: NSW premier announces state of emergency amid extreme bushfires danger – live | Australia news

The Green Wattle Creek fire is moving quickly towards the southern highlands village of Balmoral. The RFS advises it is now too late to leave Balmoral and people should seek shelter.

Fires in the Shoalhaven LGA are getting worse. It is now too late to leave in Jerrawangola and Wandandian.

Scroll down our coverage to see the view from Vincentia beach.

The smoke is really starting to overtake Sydney. Here is a tweet from the Bureau of Meteorology only two hours ago showing the smoke on the radar, compared with the radar now:

“In Sydney we’ve just been watching the visibility deteriorate,” says Gabrielle Woodhouse from the bureau.

For many people from NSW and Australia, Jervis Bay and its surrounds are synonymous with Australian summer holidays. Today the view from the beach in Vincentia is terrifying.

Hi, it’s Amy Corderoy taking over from Michael McGowan …

NSW paramedics are bracing for more heat and fire-related emergencies, warning vulnerable people to be vigilant and protect themselves today.

There has already been a 10% increase in calls for patients with respiratory conditions over the past week as bushfire smoke causes dangerous conditions, AAP reports. Young children and elderly people are also at risk.

An additional 187 extra paramedics will be on duty to help tackle the “quite remarkable conditions”, says NSW Ambulance’s chief executive, Dominic Morgan.

He said anyone in a “vulnerable group” such as the elderly or very young needed a plan to cope with the heat and ensure they stayed well hydrated.

“Just this morning I became aware of a three-year-old who had such a severe asthma attack that they were unable to speak,” Morgan told reporters in Sydney.

Signs of heat exhaustion include dizziness and confusion, headaches, appetite loss, excessive sweating, leg, stomach and arm cramps and thirst.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions has announced it is will push for an urgent upgrade of health workplace health safety conditions to address the risk of working in heat and smoke.

The ACTU secretary, Sally McManus, and assistant secretary Liam O’Brien are announcing the proposal today to regulate exposure to heat and smoke.

The guidelines include advice on how to minimise exposure to heat and smoke pollution and how to recognise serious health risks.

A fire in the Shoalhaven area is now at watch and act.

Crowds are growing at a protest outside the prime minister’s residence, Kirribilli House. Australian Associated Press reports that riot squad officers are on the scene but there is no sense of the protest getting out of hand.

A group of students representing the Schools Strike 4 Climate movement stood with other protesters, some of whom were wearing Hawaiian shirts, carrying placards declaring “The time to talk is now” and “C’mon SloMo”.

From Australian Associated Press:

They called on the federal government to take immediate action on climate change and urged no new coal and gas projects, a transition to 100% renewables and funding for affected fossil fuel workers.

Dr Kim Loo said there was no framework currently in place to deal with the effects of climate change on health.

“It is negligent not to do anything about mitigation or adaptation. It is criminal to continue mining, burning, exporting oil, coal and gas because it’s fuelling the crisis,” Loo told the crowd.

“And this is the greatest crisis to our health in the 21st century.”

Cheers erupted as Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi said Morrison was missing at a time of crisis.

“Everyone is gathered here today to ask one question, ‘Where the bloody hell is the prime minister?’” Faruqi said.

Sydney student Ambrose Hayes said Morrison’s holiday was badly timed.

“Our direct message to Scott Morrison is for him to come home … even though he’s entitled to a holiday, it shouldn’t be at a time where Australia is in crisis,” said the 14-year-old.

Ambulance Victoria responded to eight reports of children locked in vehicles yesterday, including a preschool-aged girl who was left with a primary school-aged child in a hot car at Narre Warren South about 4.30pm.

The girl wasn’t taken to hospital.

Please do not do this.

The NSW ambulance commissioner, Dominic Morgan, says paramedics have seen a 10% increase in call-outs for patients suffering respiratory ailments in the last week amid what he called “remarkable” conditions.

He said people with respiratory conditions “need to be very vigilant”.

“It can be a life-threatening condition,” he said. “Just this morning, I became aware of a three-year-old who had such a severe asthma attack that they were unable to speak.”

Air quality in much of NSW is rated from poor to hazardous on Thursday.

From a protest outside the prime minister’s Sydney residence at Kirribilli this morning. They’re unhappy at Scott Morrison’s absence during bushfire crisis.

What does a state of emergency actually mean?

It allows powers to be transferred from the NSW government to the Rural Fire Service commissioner.

Those powers include:

• The power to direct any NSW government agency to conduct or refrain from conducting its functions
• Control and coordinate the allocation of government resources
• Evacuate people from property within the declared area
• Close roads and thoroughfares to traffic
• Pull down or shore up infrastructure at risk of collapse
• Order the shutdown of essential utilities in the declared area, including electricity, gas, oil and water
• Enter or take possession of property in the course of the emergency response.

That press conference with the the NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian, and the RFS commissioner, Shane Fitzsimmons, has now ended.

Just to reiterate, the premier announced a state of emergency for NSW for the next seven days amid “unpredictable” weather conditions that are causing extreme fire danger across much of the state today and later in the week.

Fitzsimmons said there were three major fires he was concerned about. All three are burning near residential populations, and he said there was a risk communities could be impacted today.

They are the Currowan fire on the state’s south coast near Batemans Bay and Ulladulla, the Gospers Mountain fire which stretches through the Central Coast to Lithgow, and the Ruined Castle fire which stretches from Picton in Sydney’s south-west through the Blue Mountains and into the state’s west.

Both the Gospers Mountain and Green Wattle Creek fire are burning at “watch and act” this morning. All other fires are at “advice”.

Shane Fitzsimmons continues, saying he’s picking up a sense of “despair” in firefighters.

Look, I think the big thing that I’m picking up from crews, year in, year out, is their sense of despair and challenge because you’ve got such a dry landscape, the structure of the landscape is resulting in fires starting so easily and spreading so very quickly, and proving to be extremely difficult to suppress and contain.

And we just cannot overstate the criticality of the drought and its effect on the vegetation and how volatile the fire behaviour becomes. And we’re seeing fire behaviour much greater, with spotting activity and flame heights and that sort of thing, than would otherwise be the case for the sorts of conditions we’re experiencing.

He said the fires had a psychological impact on firefighters:

They’re invested in their local community. So when they see, when they see impact, when they see loss, when they see damage and destruction and devastation in their local community, it’s not just a job, it’s not just another day in firefighting. That’s their neighbour. That’s their town. That’s their own home being impacted by the fires.

They take it very personally and the amount of conversations I’ve had with firefighters and incident controls and incident management teams that feel they’ve failed because they’ve lost a home or a property in their town.