Linda Chappell has been working with the U.S. Forest Service fighting wildfires in Utah for years, and she said she’s never seen anything like the fire she was called in to help quell in Australia. She says it’s not a stretch to say the spate of fires burning through Australia are larger than any fires anyone alive has seen.
“The scale of what’s going on is unprecedented in our lifetime. Whether it is historically or not, I don’t know,” Chappell said. “But in our lifetimes, certainly.”
Chappell, a planning section chief, is one of at least three other Utahns who were dispatched to Australia to help fight the wildfires that have torched much of New South Wales and have bled into Victoria and South Australia, killing more than twenty people and displacing thousands.