Whanganui volunteer firefighter Aaron Hartley (second from right) was a member of a Fire & Emergency New Zealand deployment to fight the wildfires burning in Canada.
Whanganui volunteer firefighter Aaron Hartley (second from right) was a member of a Fire & Emergency New Zealand deployment to fight the wildfires burning in Canada.
A Whanganui rural firefighter had to adapt to a new environment as part of an international deployment to battle the ongoing wildfires in Canada.
The wildfires have burned more than 25 million acres of land, around 100,000 square kilometres, across Canada since the start of the 2023 fire season, making it their worst on record.
Whanganui Volunteer Fire Brigade rural fire officer Aaron Hartley was part of a deployment sent to the province of Alberta to battle the fires.
The fire Hartley and his team were sent to, called the Grizzly Complex, was over 180,000 hectares in size.
“They were asking us if we have fires that size in New Zealand and if we had fires that size, pretty much the population would be in the ocean,” he said.
The size wasn’t the only difference in the fires compared to what he’d experienced in New Zealand.
“It was just completely different, different fuel type ... the weather patterns are different.”
The area lacked the thicker native bush of New Zealand, with the landscape instead made up mostly of conifer and spruce trees, leaving needles on the ground which burn quite easily.
Hartley and his team were in Alberta for five weeks and worked around the edges of the fire.
“Every day we’d go walk the line, establish the fire perimeter, put out hotspots and stop the fire from growing,
“It was just a matter of containing that fire and extinguishing the edge so it can’t grow any further,” he said.
He and the rest of the squad had to be transported in and out of the area each day via helicopter due to the area being so vast and the fires so intense, with anything other than low-intensity fires too dangerous to fight from the ground.
“In some parts, they were real intense, where it was pretty much extinguished using the big planes and the helicopters,” he said.
Hartley and his team had to be taken out of the area by helicopter due to the size of the fire.
There were other aspects of Canada that took some getting used to, like close encounters with grizzly bears and the long days of the Canadian summer.
Fire season starts in spring in Canada but when Hartley got there it was the beginning of summer, which meant the sun would set at around 11.30pm.
“When you get up in the morning at like six the suns already beaming in the sky, so they’re real long days over there.”
The difference in day lengths made it hard for him to sleep during the trip.
Despite these changes, he said how they responded to the fire was similar to how it was done in New Zealand.
“There were subtle differences but other than that what we were doing was pretty much what we do here as well, it’s just on a different intensity scale,” he said.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Fenz) has sent four teams to Canada so far.
The deployments came at the request of the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, which put out a call for international help after the fires reached a threshold where it would be necessary.
Fenz has sent firefighters on international deployments since 2000 and put out a call for nominations to go to Canada, which Hartley answered and was willing to answer again.
“I don’t know if anyone else from Whanganui are going, but I wouldn’t mind going again if the call came up.”
Finn Williams is a multimedia journalist for the Whanganui Chronicle. He joined the Chronicle in early 2022 and regularly covers stories about business, events and emergencies. He also enjoys writing opinion columns on whatever interests him.
