Alberta firefighter recalls stint fighting bushfires in Australia
EDMONTON — A cohort of Canadian wildfire firefighters recently returned to the frozen tundra, after a stint down under helping fight the out-of-control bushfires raging across Australia.
On Jan. 9, Morgan Kehr, director of wildfire operations with Alberta Wildfire, landed back in Edmonton after spending 39 days in New South Wales, a state that’s been seeing the brunt of the wildfire destruction.
Kehr was part of a group of 21 Canadian firefighters who arrived in Australia at the start of December and said the reception from Australians was amazing.
“No matter where you went if people saw our uniforms or heard our accents, they would stop and thank us.”
Kehr’s role in Australia was serving as a deployment liaison officer. The Canadian firefighters were mainly in incident management roles, helping with the logistics of fighting the fires. Some are also helping with the aviation units.
“They were operations chiefs, plans chiefs, aircraft managers. And then some of them were airtac supervisors which did quite a bit of flying directing, tanker bombers and aircraft on the fires,” Kehr said.
SIMILAR FIREFIGHTING STYLE
The fact Canadian and Albertan firefighters have a similar perspective as Australian firefighters is what makes them work best, Kehr said.
“We manage fires very similarly. They’ve been up to Alberta, and Canada, and helped us out, we’ve worked with them before,” Kehr said.
“That’s probably a testament of what Alberta can offer as we fit into their systems easily because we are similar. And that’s important. When an organization is already stressed, it’s hard to teach somebody else.”
An example Kehr offered was the metric system, which both Australia and Canada use. But for the Americans who also are helping with the fires, Kehr said there was some difficulty with conversion of metric to imperial systems.
Compared to wildfires in Alberta, Kehr said what he experienced in Australia was unusual and impressive, because of the amount of fire spread across the landscape.
“We have large runs in Alberta, we have rapid spread in Alberta and we have highintensity flames but not over the landscape or the breadth of area like we saw in New South Wales,” Kehr said.
“In Alberta, we’ll see threeto five-kilometre spotting range on the extreme ends and, in New South Wales, it was 20 and 30 kilometres. That’s mainly due to the trees that were burning. The eucalyptus (trees) are very oily and they’ll throw leaves a lot further than what we’re used to.”
The spotting range, Kehr explained, is the distance fires are starting ahead of the main fire because of embers being picked up in the updraft and moved on the wind.
HIGHLIGHTING SUCCESSES
Across Australia, at least 23 people have been killed and nearly 2,000 homes have been destroyed, but Kehr said it’s important to highlight the successes, too.
“I don’t know the exact numbers but if there’s been 2,500 houses lost, there’s probably been 15- to 20,000 saved,” Kehr said.
“Those are important numbers people sometimes don’t focus (on) or don’t hear.”
And luckily, New South Wales is finally getting some reprieve with much-needed precipitation.
Now back in Edmonton, Kehr said he doesn’t expect to return to Australia as preparations begin for our own wildfire season.