Temperatures reach record lows overnight in Tasmanian town Liawenee

Temperatures in Tasmania have dropped to record lows in the last 24 hours causing widespread frost, snow, and lakes freezing over.

Transcript

00:00This morning, I guess we'll be talking about Liweeny, it gets a lot of attention as the

00:05coldest place in Tasmania, one of the coldest places in Australia. I guess fortunately,

00:10not that many people live out in that area permanently. It's a lot of what Tasmanians

00:14might call shack, it's a shack town, so there's a lot of holiday homes, tourism ventures and

00:19things like that. The population swells around long weekends, school holidays. There's also

00:26this kind of curiosity or niche factor about wanting to experience just this level of freezing.

00:32So we do see around this time of year, a lot of people venturing out to these areas to

00:37stay in some of these shacks, just because it's just something different, you know, you

00:40don't really get to experience this level of cold. But again, that does come with some

00:44challenges. And we spoke with some locals yesterday who can definitely attest to that.

00:50Came to work this morning and the ground staff had found that several of our pipes, water

00:55pipes had burst. And of course, we were shut. So we've had a series of water flows into

01:01some accommodation rooms and into the toilets in the hotel.

01:06I think one of the biggest things I had to learn at this time of the year, and I had

01:11to learn it the hard way, is you have to every night, you have to drain, turn your water

01:16off and drain all the pipes.

01:19So yesterday morning, it was minus 12.9. And that was the coldest temperature on record

01:25for July in Tasmania. That record lasted 24 hours because this morning, the Weather Bureau

01:31tells us that it was minus 13.5. So that's a new cold record for July for Tasmania. It's

01:38actually, for comparison, that is the exact same temperature recorded at Casey Research

01:42Station in Antarctica this morning.