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The Bureau of Meteorology said heavy smoke billowing from bushfires surrounding Sydney will linger in the city basin until Saturday, and probably longer if the catastrophic blazes on the metropolis outskirts cannot be contained.

The current air quality in Sydney is now as hazardous as the pokie room in the Bourbon and Beefsteak Hotel in the Roger Rogerson era.

Hazardous levels of pollution were recorded in the east and south-west of Sydney on Wednesday. Heavy smoke has been blowing into the city from a large fire near Warragamba Dam near the Blue Mountains, the NSW RFS said.

“This is like before the Tobacco laws changed” said an RFS official.

“It’s like you’ve got a room full of hundreds of drunk blokes punching durries non-stop”

“Smoke is also affecting areas including the north coast, central coast, Hawkesbury, Wollondilly, Queanbeyan and Shoalhaven areas.”

The NSW environment department said this season’s bushfire emergency had caused “some of the highest air pollution ever seen in NSW”.

“NSW has experienced elevated levels of pollutants as a result of smoke from the bushfire emergency, and dust caused by the severe drought,” a spokesman said.

“NSW has experienced other periods of poor air quality that lasted several weeks, including the 1994 Sydney bushfires and the Black Christmas bushfires of December 2001 to January 2002.

“This event, however, is the longest and the most widespread in our records.”

These revelations may provide merit to the claims made by all the fire chiefs that climate change is something we should be worried about, because you know it’s already half-fucked the Great Barrier Reef and 10% of the Australian continent is now on fire.

Luckily for Australians, these records will no longer keep breaking, after Morrison merged the Federal Department of Environment with the Federal Department of Agriculture.