General News
6 January, 2024
Summer reading: Inglewood firefighter talks about tackling Canadian blazes
SUMMER READING By CHRIS EARL BRADEN Pearce has experienced the brunt of brutal bushfires in his almost 20 years with Forest Fire Management Victoria. Fires ripping through fuel-powered eucalyptus trees that dot the countryside, prone to explode in...
SUMMER READING
By CHRIS EARL
BRADEN Pearce has experienced the brunt of brutal bushfires in his almost 20 years with Forest Fire Management Victoria.
Fires ripping through fuel-powered eucalyptus trees that dot the countryside, prone to explode in the searing Australian summer.
The flaming menace visible to the eyes of firefighters equipped to quell its spread.
But fighting water with water? That was an experience new to the veteran firefighter who has just returned from a five-week deployment in the last of four Victorian contingents battling wildfires in Canada over the past four months.
““You can be walking in gum boots in water but it burns,” said Braden back home in Inglewood.
“The fire burns on the ground ... sometimes you can’t see any flames, just an ash pit. Then if it hits trees, there’s flames within minutes.
“Black spruce is that species that suddenly burns.”
The North American species of spruce tree in the pine family is widespread across Canada and dotted the rugged landscape beyond the old gold mining town of Keg River, more than 500km north of Alberta, that served as base camp for Braden’s Australian crew where accommodation was initially in tents
“There were Australians from Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and then contingents from South Africa and Costa Rica - we were all working with Canada’s first nations people in tackling the fires,” he said.
“The South Africans would sing before a briefing, before breakfast, everywhere they would sing. They’re a happy people.”
Braden, who is FFMV’s senior forest and roading officer now based in Bendigo, said crews were choppered into remote areas north of Keg River to fight fires in “dead flat” remote country normally producing oil and gas “with no roads and no tracks”.
“We’ve be choppered in every day for shifts of up to 12 hours ... it would take half an hour to fly us to the fire ground,” he said. “There are dams all over the place and we’d be running hoses for up to 1km.”
Crews - each taskforce with 20 firefighters - worked 14 days on, two days for rest and then another 14 days, during Braden’s time in remote Canada.
He said machinery did not arrive until the third week he was there.
“And the machines would be working in groups of three or four. They could have sunk in the ice and water ... the country is unique and looks green but their snow is dry snow and the countryside is really dry,” he said.
FFMV sent 148 firefighters, Incident management and support personnel to Canada between May and August.
For Braden, it was quick action to get his first passport, only receiving it two days before spending fours days in airport lounges and on planes making his way to Canada.
Wildfires in Canada have burned more than 17.3 million hectares this season, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.
The agency says that is more than double the previous record of 7.1 million hectares in 1995 and likely to keep rising because wildfire season in Canada typically continues into October.
Fires have stretched beyond the deceptive land where Braden was deployed. Only a fortnight ago, the western province of British Columbia had 376 active fires, the Northwest Territories 237, 143 in Yukon and 66 in Ontario. There were still 88 fire burning across Alberta.
Now back on duty in Victoria, Braden is preparing for the summer fire season with FFMV ready to have its first intake of seasonal firefighters next week. Some will be based at the Inglewood depot, others attached to depots across the region ready to assist volunteer CFA brigades respond to fires in the danger period.
Braden spent 14 years based at Inglewood before promotion took him to Bendigo, having started his professional firefighting career in Cohuna.
The Canadian deployment was his first overseas posting.