Months of Unprecedented Fires Ravage Australia's Tourism Industry

It's becoming a familiar story: Extreme weather events and natural disasters — be it flooding, fires, or snowstorms — reaching unprecedented and record-breaking levels, upending local communities, cities, and ecosystems, and, of course, battering tourism industries as a result. The fires in Australia have been raging since the autumn and affecting tourism-heavy regions in the states of Victoria and New South Wales. There have also been fires in Western Australia, South Australia, and Tasmania. Residents and tourists have been evacuated from the New South Wales' 155-mile coastline in what the Transport minister called the "largest mass relocation of people out of the region that we’ve ever seen." Conditions could worsen over the weekend, with temperatures on the southern coast c