NZ firefighters to aid in Canada

A helicopter is used to douse wildfires raging in Edmonton.

Two Northlanders are among 16 firefighters from rural New Zealand flying to Canada to help battle blazes raging in almost 800,000 hectares of forest.

The principal rural fire officer for Whangarei and Kaipara, Kevin Ihaka, and Diane Sanderson, of the Department of Conservation's Dargaville office, fly out from Auckland today for an initial 35-day deployment.

The western Canada wildfires in Edmonton have forced thousands of people to evacuate and thick smoke has triggered air quality warnings across the country and into the United States. The NZ firefighters will fly into Vancouver before transferring to Edmonton in Alberta, to start an expected five-week deployment providing frontline support to local firefighters, Mr Ihaka said.

Kevin Ihaka all ready to fight wildfires in Canada. Photo / Michael Cunningham

He said he had never been to fight fires in Canada but New Zealand had sent firefighters to the second largest country in the world when asked previously.

"We're going as a preformed management team, which means that normally we'd slot in with other teams and carry out individual jobs, but this time we're sending the whole team from New Zealand as a management unit and will be managing the whole process."

Mr Ihaka said the New Zealand team would be filling every position from incident controller down to supervisors. His job would be operations manager while Ms Sanderson would work as the logistics manager. He will perform some management and firefighting duties but reckons most of his time will be spent behind computers and in meetings. A team from Australia is also flying over to help.

"There's a great relationship between New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the US. There'll be people we'll run into while in Canada who we've worked with in Australia and other places, and so it really makes it easy for us to hit the ground running," he said.

The deployment followed a request from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre last week. About 800,000 hectares of forest are burning across the states of Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Colombia, as well as in Alaska. New Zealand previously lent support to Canadian authorities in 2009 during a serious outbreak of wildfires.