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