More Albertans arrive to help battle Australia fires
Ten Alberta firefighters arrived in Australia on Thursday, adding to Canada’s efforts to aid the battle against devastating wildfires in that country.
The new arrivals bring the number of Albertans stationed in the Australian states of New South Wales and Queensland to 23. By Jan. 4, officials expect a total of 87 Canadians to be on the ground providing aid.
Though Canada has seen plenty of wildfires in recent years, Glen Burgress, who is co-ordinating Canadian efforts out of Sydney, says these fires are especially severe.
“I’ve seen a lot of pretty dramatic fire behaviour but nothing like what we’re seeing here,” said Burgress, who typically works with the British Columbia Wildfire Service.
“The temperatures are so different and the fire behaviours are so different. It’s not what we’re used to dealing with, for sure. The basics of firefighting don’t really change, but the volatility and the rates of spread are really something we’re not overly used to.”
The wildfires have killed at least 18 people and have destroyed more than 1,000 homes. The fires have burned more than four million hectares so far — more than six times the amount burned by Alberta’s Fort Mcmurray fire in 2016.
Edmonton’s Morgan Kehr is in Australia serving as Canada’s deployment liaison officer. He says the sheer size of these fires presents a unique challenge.
“The fires over New South Wales are spread over a much larger area. That’s one of the biggest differences from Fort Mcmurray, where, though it impacted a lot of people, it was essentially one or several small communities around one bigger community,” Kehr said from the airport where he was waiting to greet newly arriving Canadian fire crews.
“This is a lot more rural residents and scattered small villages and towns than we had to deal with in Fort Mcmurray.”
Another difference is that all front-line firefighters in Australia are volunteers, many of them stepping away from their jobs to battle the blazes threatening their communities.
“All of our firefighters are paid firefighters, whether they’re contracted or staff. Here, they don’t have any paid firefighters,” Kehr said.
“The actual guys running the fire engines and shovels are volunteer firefighters here.”
The recent blazes come in the midst of extreme weather patterns in Australia, including the dangerous combination of blazing-hot temperatures and heavy winds.
“There’s very, very high temperatures. Even here, in Sydney, on the coast, it got to 43 C and it was warmer inland, with very low relative humidities,” Burgress said. “And then a weather event came up from the south, a cold front passed, and on the front of the cold front came a lot of winds, a lot of instability.
“So you get very hot, dry temperatures coupled with an extreme wind event and there’s a lot of extreme fire behaviour. That’s what happened a couple of days ago and we’re still dealing with the aftermath of that.”
All other Canadian firefighters in Australia volunteered to fly across the globe to provide aid, something Burgress said everyone is happy to do, even during the holidays.
The Canadians abroad are mainly conducting incident management roles, meaning that they’re helping with the logistics of fighting the fires. Some specialists are also managing aviation units.
Australia asked for international help as the fires worsened, and Canada, the United States and New Zealand all offered personnel.
It’s the first time that Canadian crews have helped out in Australia, but Australian firefighters have assisted in Canada in the past, including during the 2018 B.C. wildfires.
“Surprisingly enough, when I walked into the New South Wales state operation centre, there were four or five people who had been to Alberta to help,” Kehr said. “It is a fairly small community.”
The initial group of 21 Canadians who arrived in Australia at the start of December will soon be heading home, as a new group of 21 Canadians is set to arrive in the country later this week.