Firefighters were working round-the-clock Thursday to snuff out blazes in Australia's south-east before the hot weather predicted for the weekend makes for the return of perfect fire conditions. January's record-breaking heatwave has seen lightning strikes ignite hundreds of forest fires that have reduced homes to ash, killed thousands of livestock and blackened the pastures of hundreds of farmers. In the island state of Tasmania, where an estimated 1 per cent of the land area has burned and 126 properties were lost, earlier projections of up to 100 dead have been discounted, dpa reported. The inferno was touched of Friday, when Hobart, the state capital, registered a temperature of over 41 degrees, the highest since records began being kept in 1883. The thousands of tourists trapped by flames that cut off roads to the Tasman Peninsula have now been escorted to Hobart by police convoy.
