Rescue teams captured a sweetly intimate moment between one firefighter and a displaced koala amid the horrific brushfires in Southern Australia.
According to the North East Forest Alliance, more than 2,000 total koalas — which aren’t fast enough to flee burning environments — have perished in the fires, with up to one-third of the animal’s habitats lost on the northern coast of New South Wales,The Guardianreports.
Fires in Sydney, Australia.David Gray/Getty
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“When you have very hot, dry, windy conditions, if all of those things come together, a fire can get quickly out of control,” a spokesperson for the Climate Council of Australia, toldTime. “As the climate is warming up, we’re getting more and more extreme hot days and currently, of course, Australia is in the grip of probably unprecedented heatwave conditions almost right across the continent.”
A seven-day state of emergency was declared on Thursday. More than 7.4 million acres have already burned, displacing more than 800 people from their homes and killing six, theAssociated Pressreported.
After getting the marsupial to safety, she poured water all over the koala to cool its burns before taking him to a local animal hospital.
“Today we made the decision to put Ellenborough Lewis to sleep,” the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital said in a statement onFacebookat the time.
“We placed him under general anesthesia this morning to assess his burns injuries and change the bandages,” the statement continued. “We recently posted that ‘burns injuries can get worse before they get better.’ In Ellenborough Lewis’s case, the burns did get worse, and unfortunately would not have gotten better.”
Last month, the hospital started aGoFundMe pagewith hopes of raising $25,000 to help treat koalas who had been rescued from the wildfires — and as of Monday, they’ve raised more than $2.1 million.
source: people.com
