The brave men and women who were part of a team of firefighters that were sent to Canada are back on home soil. A crew of 100 firefighters and a nine-person management team from the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment’s Working on Fire (WOF) programme were deployed to the province of Manitoba in Canada on Tuesday, August 10, as the country was experiencing record-breaking heat and associated dry weather.
The request for assistance came from the Canadian Inter-agency Forest Fire Centre, which has a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Canada and South Africa asking for firefighting assistance from Working on Fire. The MOU also provides for the exchange of wildland fire management resources between these two countries.
The WOF group assisted the provincial firefighting authorities with wildland firefighting efforts while the firefighters were deployed to various fires in Loon Straits in the Eastern Sector and Cold Lake complex in the Western Sector where multiple fires were burning.
@wo_fire firefighters arriving at Garden Court after their trip to Canada #WorkingOnFire #SavingLives pic.twitter.com/upTC6Ti6D7
— Environmentza (@environmentza) September 16, 2021
As reported by IOL, the International Agencies Resource Representative Trevor Abrahams added that the success of the deployment is because the Working on Fire programme showed over the past 18 years that it has the ability to deploy large firefighting resources to various countries.
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