This story was originally published in our May/June 2022 issue as "Living with Fire." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.
It was Australia as few had seen it before. Apocalyptic images beamed around the world of Sydney’s shimmering cityscape enrobed in heavy smoke against a sci-fi-orange sky. The harbor’s soaring white Opera House was silhouetted, sharply defined against dark clouds. For more than half a year — starting before July 2019 and lasting until March 2020 — bushfires raged indiscriminately across the landscape, marching beyond the distant bush toward tidy suburbs and teeming subdivisions.
They called it Black Summer. It was not just one fire, or even hundreds. Australia was hit with 15,000 separate fires. Even in a country with centuries of bushfire history, which has built up psychological scar tissue against nature’s flames, “no one had ever seen a fire season like that,” says Ben Shepherd, an inspector with the New South Wales (NSW) Rural Fire Service in Sydney. Fires were so wild and erratic some days that they exceeded the worst-case-scenario predictions of a sophisticated computer program used by the fire service. “That was unheard of,” he says.
Everywhere in Southeast Australia, people were on the move, outrunning fire. Beaches, once places of recreation, were suddenly transformed into sites for evacuation. With nowhere else to run, families and children with their pets huddled together, prepared to jump into the surf to escape the flames. Finally, the Royal Australian Navy and Australian Army evacuated thousands from the sand with boats and helicopters. Overall, some 8,000 members of the Australian Defence Force took part in Operation Bushfire Assist over the course of Black Summer.
