Public life ground to a halt, many lost power, and scores of people died behind closed doors. What sounds like the start of a post-apocalyptic movie is in fact Melbourne in January 2009.
More than half a million households have lost power, trains are being cancelled, some rail lines have buckled.
"I was a bike commuter to work. And the heat coming off the roads was phenomenal. You really, really didn't spend much time on those paved areas if you could possibly help it. Even as I rode through the parklands, it was still searingly hot," he says. As a result, about half a million households lost power on the evening of January 30, and rolling blackouts were triggered in central and western Victoria.
"It's a slow-burn realisation that the numbers are bigger than they would normally be," says Rebecca Owen, who was managing the morgue at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine during the heatwave."It wasn't really until we literally were at capacity that you think, 'Oh goodness, this isn't going to go away anytime soon.'"Rebecca Owen and the team were even considering bringing in demountable cool rooms to plug at the car park.
"Above the age of 65 or 75, that ability to sweat is quite blunted. So it means that the amount that you heat up … is going to be much higher," Professor Jay explained.But heat deaths rarely appear on a death certificate. In the years since, his work has focused on extreme heat, at the Bureau of Meteorology and later with the World Meteorological Organisation.
"Certainly at a warning level, the electricity authorities are probably going to stop disconnecting people from power because they're not paying their bills."
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