SYDNEY—Australia’s biggest city has been shrouded in hazardous smoke for the past week, as wildfires burning across the country’s drought-stricken east coast are—in some cases—becoming too big to put out.
The fires are turning the daytime sky in Sydney orange and causing air quality to dip to levels more often seen in cities like Delhi and Beijing. Schools are keeping students inside during recess and canceling sports and other outdoor activities.
“I can’t see anything from my apartment except for smoke and haze,” said Sarah Armstrong, who normally has views over Botany Bay from her home about nine miles south of the Sydney center. Ash and burned leaves have turned up on her doorstep, blown from fires smoldering on the city’s fringe. “I’ve been keeping my doors and windows closed but you can still smell it at times inside. It’s bad.”
The smoke is so dense that it has tricked the government’s weather radar into thinking it’s rain. Satellite images show plumes of smoke stretching more than 1,200 miles away to New Zealand.
“The massive [New South Wales state] fires are in some cases just too big to put out at the moment,” the Australian Bureau of Meteorology said on its official Twitter account. The government agency is forecasting high temperatures and gusting winds in the coming days that will keep the fire danger elevated across the country.
This year’s fires began much earlier and are burning more fiercely than usual across millions of acres of dried out forests, testing local fire authorities’ ability to bring them under control.
Wildfires have killed four people and destroyed more than 680 homes across eastern Australia since the start of November, months earlier than the usual summer bush fire season. Nearly 100 fires are blazing across New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state.
Officials are particularly concerned about a number of fires around Sydney, the state capital where about five million people live.
Strong winds on Friday combined several large fires into a single giant blaze northwest of the city, creating a 40-mile fire front. The fires “will take many weeks to put out” rural fire service officials said in a statement “and only when we get good rain.”
On Thursday, fire authorities in the U.S. sent 21 American specialist firefighters over to assist, joining Canadian wildfire experts and U.S. aerial firefighting companies who have been contracted to battle the fires from the air.
“It’s a valuable tool for both countries as we face increasingly complex and challenging fires,” said Jeff Rupert, director of the Department of the Interior’s Office of Wildland Fire, in a statement. “The interagency team of professionals will share expertise from managing wildland fire under a variety of locations and conditions in the U.S., many of which are similar to what they’ll encounter in Australia.”
The trend in Australia, as with California, is moving toward bigger, faster-moving and more destructive wildfires, due in part to climate change, which causes higher temperatures and extreme dryness, creating more fuel.
“One of the big issues that is creating these fires is the gradual drying out. Our minimum temperatures are a lot higher than they were,” said Angus Emmott a third-generation cattle farmer from the western part of Queensland state.
His family has been documenting Outback rainfall for more than a century, in records now being used by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for modern climate modeling.
“When you get very low humidity and winds, it just takes one cigarette butt and it is sparking the canopy,” Mr. Emmott said.
While many rural areas in Australia have long been fire-prone, the dry and windy conditions are fanning blazes in more populous coastal areas that have never been considered at risk before.
Thousands of residents in Noosa shire, in tropical Queensland state, were evacuated last month as a fire ripped through a usually boggy coastal scrubland, threatening beachside suburbs where residents are prepared for tropical storms, but not fires.
“Our population here tend to be people who’ve escaped big city life, no one anticipated the scale of the fires they’re seeing,” said Tony Wellington, the area’s mayor. “The consensus view was Queensland doesn’t experience fires of this type because our vegetation is more diverse.”
—Erin Ailworth contributed to this article.
Write to Rachel Pannett at rachel.pannett@wsj.com
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