POWER MULTIPLIED

My Heart Breaks

This excerpt from POWER MULTIPLIED, available for pre-order now, is from a passage where the heroine is caught in a California wildfire. California has had its share of wildfires in recent years, and now Australia is suffering mightily from terrible conflagrations. Rare animal species may actually go extinct from the blazes themselves, or the starvation and death from thirst that follows. Just today I read about three Americans who died when their air tanker, designed for watering the fires, crashed. I visited Australia some time ago. The people I met were gregarious and friendly and kind. I visited refuges where I could study species of animals that evolved nowhere else than on Australia's isolated continent. My first scuba diving experience ever was in the Great Barrier Reef. It is sometimes hard to feel what strangers far away are feeling in times of disaster. I have never been trapped in fire, but I have, as part of my work at one time, donned a fire helmet and turnouts and experienced a true fire from inside a burning room. I can connect the dots--to the residents of California and Australia, to the poor panicked animals trying to flee the flames. I can see the houses burning, I can smell the smoke. And my heart breaks. Help if you can.