Reporting For Duty

We’ve all heard the numbers: 26 million acres of Australian land incinerated, an estimated one billion animals killed and more than 25 people dead. The numbers from Australia’s worst bushfire season in decades are shocking enough to capture the media’s attention for weeks on end, but they do not truly depict the portrait of civilians terrorized by fires.

Here is the scene that numbers on a page fail to illustrate: fires so engulfing that the only escape is the ocean. Civilians trying to decide between drowning and burning, pushed so close to the