No fire trucks, swampy mud, fatigue, and a beaver attack were among the obstacles faced when a Rural Fire Service member from Orange spent 35 days in the midst Canada's worst wildfire season in history.
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More than 12 million hectares, an area greater than the size of Germany, has been burnt this Canadian summer and Rural Fire Service fire aviation specialist Ash Morrow was in there amongst it.
Mr Morrow is a police officer in Sydney but grew up on a small farm outside Orange and still volunteers with the North West Orange brigade.
He recently returned from fighting the fires in Canada where he worked as part of an international inter-agency effort in Alberta alongside firefighters from all states and territories of Australia as well as South Africa, Puerto Rico, Chile, Canada and the USA.
![Rural Fire Service North West Orange fire aviation specialist Ash Morrow in front of an RFS firefighting helicopter at Dubbo Regional Airport. Picture supplied Rural Fire Service North West Orange fire aviation specialist Ash Morrow in front of an RFS firefighting helicopter at Dubbo Regional Airport. Picture supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/GpZJ7bTi6nvXt5tnNdnKeU/9035da32-2537-4740-b241-21564f79dda1.jpg/r0_376_4032_3028_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Mr Morrow said his speciality as a fire aviation specialist involves mapping and intelligence of a fire and developing air attack strategies and this is his second time helping in Canada with the first involving a quarantine period during the height of COVID.
"I've been deployed in 2021 to Ontario as a sector fire boss which is a unique role to Ontario and then deployed this year to Alberta as a divisional commander," he said.
Based in central-north Alberta in a field commander role near Peace River, 1100 kilometres from the arctic circle, Mr Morrow was responsible for an 85,000 acre quadrant with 100 staff, multiple aviation resources and heavy plant machinery.
"When we were there we were working minimum 14-hour days for 14 days straight, two days off and then another cycle of 14 days, there were some days where I was doing 17 hours," he said.
"In terms of fatigue that's something you have to manage and it can be challenging to manage."
However, he said it wasn't overwhelming and said the people sent from Australia were competent and highly trained for these incidents.
Mr Morrow said the 2021 Canadian fire season had 18 per cent more fire ignitions and a 61 per cent increase in total area burned compared to the 10-year average with 5254 fires with an area burnt of 4,307,520 hectares.
![The ground was too soft for fire trucks so firefighters carry their hose at Cadotte Lake in Alberta, Canada. Picture supplied The ground was too soft for fire trucks so firefighters carry their hose at Cadotte Lake in Alberta, Canada. Picture supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/GpZJ7bTi6nvXt5tnNdnKeU/bc7b7825-8eb9-4019-8a3a-a7bfe9c18462.JPG/r0_485_3638_2538_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
However, with two months still to go in the fire season this year has already been significantly worse.
"There's been more than 5014 fires and over 12,575,208 hectares [burnt], looking at that as a chart it's well and truly over double the 10-year average," Mr Morrow said.
"If you compare this year to every other year it trumps every record for their worst wildfire season in history."
He said it was mostly wilderness but with some remote infrastructure, including oil fields, near where they were working.
"It's completely different vegetation to here, it's boreal vegetation there, while we might have similarities in fuels between the two hemispheres, there's is very different," Mr Morrow said.
"Boreal with the pine needles, that changes things compared to our sclerophyll forest because the surface area to the atmosphere is different."
Mr Morrow said the branches of the pines create "ladder fuel" that fire can climb.
"If you've got heavy vegetation on the ground and ladder fuel all the way up, that makes it much easier for the fire to start on the ground and climb the tree and then run," he said.
"Over here with our hardwood sclerophyll forest you don't always have that ladder fuel connecting the crown of the tree to the ground.
"In some cases the ground underneath you is frozen and you're fighting the fire above it, which is unusual for us."
![Firefighters at Gift Lake in Alberta. Picture supplied by Ash Morrow RFS Firefighters at Gift Lake in Alberta. Picture supplied by Ash Morrow RFS](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/GpZJ7bTi6nvXt5tnNdnKeU/2c2880d9-43ec-4e1f-a20c-383d609396ca.jpg/r0_0_1512_1890_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
The muskeg ecosystem, which is a peat ecosystem that's difficult to traverse, along with the permafrost also proved challenging.
"Because it gets to minus 40 degrees in winter there, the ground freezes so then when you put machine cut lines like bulldozers and what-not through it and you get sun on it, it turns into swamp," Mr Morrow said.
"Those two things are unique and change the way things happen because there's no such thing as a fire truck over there, it's either all by aviation or by hand.
He said because of the boggy ground there's no access for regular vehicles but in places they could use tracked "over-snow" vehicles called Hagglunds and amphibious vehicles to get through swampy areas.
In some cases the ground underneath you is frozen and you're fighting the fire above it.
- Rural Fire Service member Ash Morrow
"You literally have teams of firefighters running hose kilometres and kilometres around the perimeter of a fire whereas [compared[ to here where we would have a fire truck and a one stop shop to directly attack a fire," Mr Morrow said.
"Logistically the operation over there is vastly greater than here and its required to be so because of the complexities they have over there in how they combat it."
He said the weather conditions played a large role in fire behaviour and conditions in Canada and one of the issues was crossover conditions where the humidity drops below the ambient temperature causing extreme fire danger.
"That's very different to what we are used to because basically we are in crossover everyday in Australia and it doesn't bother us too much," Mr Morrow said.
The wildlife also offered a unique challenge.
"They have quite large dangerous animals, they've got grizzly bears, black bears, moose, elk, beavers, cougars, timber wolves, prairie rattlesnakes, coyotes, so that was another complexity that we had to mitigate in our daily operations," he said.
There were run-ins with wildlife, "there's wildlife there all the time," he said, with the main encounters involving black bears and moose.
"We actually had a beaver attack a bucket on a helicopter when it was trying to fill up. That was something that I wasn't used to hearing," he said.
![A firefighting helicopter flies away from the smoke from a wildfire in Alberta, Canada. Picture supplied A firefighting helicopter flies away from the smoke from a wildfire in Alberta, Canada. Picture supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/GpZJ7bTi6nvXt5tnNdnKeU/8a5c0e8f-16fa-4e14-9c24-175603e4eb73.jpg/r0_511_4032_2778_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"Beavers are not as friendly as they look, they are quite aggressive."
"Being flat as well, which is interesting from an operational point of view ... when you have flat landscape radios don't work, you can't get that elevation with a tower so that makes things hard when you have 100 staff in an area of nearly over 100 kilometres and communications are lacking.
"A way of mitigating that is having aircraft in the air to relay communications, so that was something that was interesting and very different. That's a significant difference."
Since leaving the fire ground, Mr Morrow did a podcast with the New York Times about his experience and on Thursday he spoke at the International Asia Pacific Aerial Firefighting Conference in Dubbo where he discussed the differences in fighting bushfires in Australia and wildfires in the northern hemisphere.
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