Wairarapa volunteer joins fight to extinguish Canadian wildfires
Imagine deserted Canadian frontier towns with wild deer and black bears roaming the streets under a smoked-filled, orange sky.
Mauriceville-raised firefighter Daniel Marfell likened the scene on the Cariboo Plateau in Canada to an apocalypse, while taking part in the international effort to battle the wildfires in British Columbia.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand was asked in late July by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre to assist in fighting one of the worst wildfire seasons in the past 60 years.
Eighty Kiwi firefighters, Department of Conservation staff and New Zealand forestry contractors flew to Vancouver last month to help contain the massive fires.
Marfell said he’d worked with the Otago rural fire authority, which was assigned a 7000-hectare area. They managed to ‘‘knock it out’’ over a few weeks by working up to 16-hour days for 14-day stretches, with a two-day break between.
Later, they protected small settlements near the head of the fire.
‘‘It was nothing like anything I had experienced before. You could drive for 20 or 30 kilometres and everything was burnt ... The towns had all been evacuated ...
‘‘It was hard to get your head around the scale of the fire. We had a 40-person team working a 7000ha section of a total fire area of over 1 million hectares,’’ he added.
Marfell started as a volunteer firefighter four years ago with the Mauriceville rural fire force. Now he volunteers with the Masterton urban fire brigade and lives in a flat at the Masterton fire station.
He said it was great to see how well regarded New Zealand firefighters were in Canada.
‘‘I made some new friends ... We lived in a big camp of 300 small tents that surrounded a mobile command centre. It was tough living in a tiny tent for a month and doing such long shifts but I learned some amazing skills.’’
Marfell works as a landscaper but hopes to eventually be employed fulltime as a firefighter.