BLM AFS firefighters talk about their part in the international effort during Canada’s devastating fire season

The extremely slow fire season has allowed Alaska firefighting and support personnel to help the international effort in Canada as it grapples with a historic and devastating fire season that doesn’t show signs of slowing. 

The state may end the 2023 Alaska fire season with the least number of acres burned since records began in 1940. While Alaska has only had 157 wildfires burn 1,891 acres across the state as of Friday, July 21, 4,356 fires have scorched almost 28 million acres across Canada. In Alberta and British Columbia – which combined are almost as large as Alaska in square miles (620,305 to Alaska’s 665,400) – more than 2,000 wildfires have burned almost 8 million acres in the two Canadian provinces. 

Wildfires have triggered evacuations, sent smoke far into the United States and devastated communities across Canada. Most notably are the two Canadian firefighters and helicopter pilot killed while working on incidents in Canada recently. 

The international community has responded as the country enters its third month of extreme fire behavior. At least 13 countries have sent firefighting and support personnel with the U.S. contributing about 2,050 personnel, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. Of those, about 70 are from BLM Alaska Fire Service. Some are on their second fire assignment to Canada. 

They’ve traveled to Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec, filling positions as liaisons for U.S. firefighting personnel, in operations, in the main Canadian forest fire warehouse, as smokejumpers, as part of an Alaska Interagency Incident Management Team and the two BLM AFS hotshot crews. You can find various photos of the BLM AFS personnel in Canada at the BLM AFS Flickr album here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjALYAV

The first wave of BLM AFS firefighters spent a majority of June in Alberta where they worked alongside their fellow firefighters from the various Canadian provinces, Australia and South Africa.  

For them, they felt it was the most unique assignment they’ve had in their long firefighting careers and one they will cherish because of the cultural exchange they experienced.  

Here are some of their stories. 

Kay Kudo, BLM AFS Fire Specialist

Kudo started her daily morning briefings for the roughly 100 firefighters working on her section of the fire using salutations in both English, and for the four 20-person hand crews from South Africa, the Afrikaan greeting, “molo.” The diverse assembly of international firefighters would reply in unison, calling out in languages from English to Afrikaan, before Kudo dove into the daily tasks and objectives for that section of the Eagle Creek Complex in Alberta. 

At the beginning of her two-week assignment in June, Kudo did a little research on the various cultures she’d be interacting with as a Division Supervisor overseeing the operational duties of a section of the fire.  

In this role, she was responsible for the people and the on-the-ground tactical operations in an area that was closest to a community which had been heavily damaged by the fire. Her first priority was to make sure that all the personnel in her division and the people of nearby Fox Creek were kept safe. 

To further complicate this monumental task, the different terminology, accents and slang used, prompted Kudo to go extra mile making sure everyone understood what was being communicated.  

“It was a fascinating thing to be a part of, where you are literally trying to adapt to all the different cultures and do the best job you can,” she said. “Everyone feels that human connection if you take the time.” 

“It was an interesting dynamic” because she went into the situation not knowing anyone on the fire and had to start from scratch in building trust and rapport with people she was working with. Because the American wildland fire community is very interconnected, she’s usually working with at least one familiar face during a typical fire assignment in the U.S. For most of this assignment, she was the only American firefighter operating in a supervisory position. 

“I felt a lot of pressure representing my country and Alaska,” she said.  

Because Kudo is very petite, she used a yard stick to help point to different parts of the map when giving her briefings, a prop she felt unfavorably represented school authority. This tool evolved into a yardstick wrapped in pink flagging, to random sticks, until one of the local Canadian firefighters custom-designed a pointer for her – a tent pole wrapped in purple pipe cleaner with a purple dog figurine attached to the end.

“I intend to use that pointer for the rest of my career,” Kudo said of the gesture.

It was an enriching experience due to the bonds she forged with the Australians, Canadians and South Africans she worked with, and her understanding that despite their different backgrounds and experiences, everyone was working toward the same goal. 

“Everyone wants to do a good job,” Kudo said. “The first priority is to keep everyone safe; then to do our jobs well and to have fun.” 

Joe Erickson, BLM AFS Military Zone Fire Specialist 

While in Canada from June 13-29, Erickson was a Task Force Leader working on the Pembina Complex with firefighters from Australia, South Africa, and Canadians from the provinces of Yukon, British Columbia and Alberta. A Task Force Leader directs any combination of personnel or equipment performing tactical missions on incidents.  

The highlight for him and the other AFS personnel was working with others from around the world. For Erickson, he especially enjoyed working with the South Africans who were “so happy and cheerful.” 

“There were no egos. Everyone just got along,” he said. “It makes it easier to work when everyone is getting along.” This sentiment was echoed by others who recently came back from Canada. 

He even recorded video of the South African firefighters singing and dancing while walking to and from the fireline. 

Erickson said there were similarities between firefighting in Alaska and Alberta – they both have fire-adapted and fire-dependent ecosystems of the boreal forest with an abundance of black and white spruce, and duff – the partially decomposed organic ground layer beneath the litter of freshly fallen twigs, needles and leaves.  

The dirty, time intensive process of finding hot spots is also the same. Erickson said it’s called “mopping up the muskegs” in Canada. 

Both Alaska and Canada use the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System to evaluate environmental factors such as wind, temperature, fuels, topography that influence ignition, spread and behavior of wildfires.  

Yet there were some very big differences. Besides the use of the metric system and some distinct terminology, the Canadian water handling systems utilize a quarter-turn clip-on connection instead of the male to female hose ends used in the U.S. This was something Erickson saw as more efficient.  

Erickson headed back to Canada for another fire assignment about two weeks after he returned from Alberta – this time going to British Columbia as a Firing Boss.

Justen Johansen, BLM AFS Fire Specialist

In the first part of his assignment, Johansen was a Task Force Leader for two Canadian Army crews, some heavy equipment and medics on the Deep Creek Complex. The crew was very concerned with respiratory health and wore what looked like paint respirators and masks as well as one-piece bright yellow fire-resistant suits.

He said they had the time consuming and exhausting job of mopping up hot spots in an agricultural area dominated by peat farms that were littered with “massive ash pits” after the fire moved through the area. To do this in peat that were sometimes 4- to 6-feet deep, they enlisted the help of an excavator and sprayed down with water pumped from an impressively large 40,000 liter, or 10,566-gallon, water tank parked at the site.  

Not long after, a large rainstorm moved into the area and turned the ash pits into ponds. The Canadian Army was then released from its firefighting duties and Johansen moved into another Task Force Leader position. The new group comprised of three 20-person crews from South Africa, two Canadian 4-person helitack crews and three larger Canadian Firetack crews. He also filled in as a Division Supervisor for a few shifts while an Australian team took a few days off in between assignments on the fire.   

Unlike the U.S. firefighters, last names were rarely used when referring to personnel on the fire. Instead, their nationality was tagged onto their first name so Justen was known as “Justen the American.”  

There was a lot of emphasis placed on respect and dignity towards one another – especially since there were people from very different cultures working together. Johansen said he heard of two people that were demobilized from the incident just for “not being nice” to others working on the fire. 

“It felt like the team I was working for put a lot of emphasis on inclusion,” he said. “There was a lot more emphasis on people’s behavior to maintain that friendly, pleasant vibe.” 

The South African crews he worked with were “regularly singing and dancing while they were working.” 

On June 16, the crews gave a performance in front of the entire camp to mark a South African holiday called Youth Day. This public holiday honors the students that were ambushed and killed while protesting the implementation of Afrikaan, a language with West Germanic origins, as the medium of instruction in black schools in the 1970s. The riots were a key moment in the fight against apartheid, the racial segregation policy in South Africa that wasn’t abolished until 1991. While the South Africans marched and sang for their international counterparts on the fire, someone translated and explained the significance of the ceremony. 

During Johansen’s last working shift before returning to Alaska, the South Africans invited him and other firefighters to join them in a dance send off for their trip home. He jumped in the group along with a Canadian as they sang and danced.

Johansen headed back to Canada on Wednesday where he’s working in British Columbia as a Task Force Leader. 

Isaiah Fischer, BLM AFS smokejumper

The smokejumper was a Heavy Equipment Boss assigned to a dozer group consisting of four dozers and an excavator on the Kimiwan Complex of two fires. The fire he was assigned to, PWF-038, was burning in about 16,000 acres of oil country within the Peace River Forest Area in Western Alberta. The map of the fire area Fischer used included an extensive web of oil infrastructure both above and underground.   

“Anywhere you have to take heavy equipment over it you have to make a crossing to certain specifications,” Fischer said. 

The operations relied extensively upon heavy equipment and helicopters, and fire camps resembled oil field worksites . Fischer often works as a Division Supervisor on fires in Alaska and the Lower 48, overseeing the operational resources employed within a section of the fire area. In the Lower 48, this could often include a contingency of heavy equipment in addition to firefighting crews. The operations used on the fire he was assigned to ran differently from what he’s used to for fires on American soil and even different from some of the fires the others were assigned to in Canada. The person in charge of the overall operations on this fire spent most of the time surveying the work and fire activity from the air, and a lot less time on the ground, Fischer added. 

Also, the Canadians, and most of the rest of the world, use the metric system. This made converting to measurements the American firefighters are used to complicated and time consuming. After a while, he stopped trying to calculate everything on his phone and started making educated guesses as he slowly got better at gauging equivalencies. 

“You had a tough time knowing how hot it was or how cold it was going to be because everything is in Celsius,” Fischer said.  

BLM AFS Fire Specialist Justen Johansen, who was also in Alberta at the time, said his Canadian counterparts recognized the struggle the Americans had with converting the measurements. 

“They’d say the temperature in Celsius and they’d say, ‘Sorry, I’m not sure what the ‘Freedom unit’ conversion is on that,” Johansen said. 

Surprisingly, the Canadians in Alberta easily mixed miles and feet into the conversation because early survey measurements were done in chains which equal 66 feet or 22 yards; units used in both the U.S. customary and British Imperial systems.  

“They’re very skookum in what a mile is and what feet are,” Fischer said. He also noticed some efficiencies in Canada, commenting he attended fewer briefings and they tended to concentrate on operations, freeing up more time on working in the field. 

The drivers of the flat-bed trailers that transported the dozers and excavators worked quickly and effectively. What could take several hours and even days to move heavy equipment around on a Lower 48 fire sometimes took as little as 30 minutes on a Canadian fire. These drivers, who did not own the heavy equipment but were there to simply transport it , would load and unload it for the operator in about 10 minutes, then quickly drive back to the staging area and wait for another call .  

“That was something we could learn from, in my eyes,” Fischer said. Adding that the heavy equipment operators he worked with were, like everyone else on the fire, “super friendly.” 

“They’re very into trying to do the job you’re trying to get them to do,” Fischer said. 

He headed back to Canada on July 17 as a Division Operations with the Alaska Interagency Incident Management Team in British Columbia. 

Collins Bonds, Military Zone Assistant Fire Management Officer 

Bonds was one of the first arrivals to Canada from AFS in June because he was sent ahead to be an Interagency Resource Representative, or a liaison, to U.S. firefighters in Alberta. He was a liaison for several U.S. firefighters filling various positions and federal hand crews including the BLM AFS Midnight Sun and Chena hotshot crews while in Alberta. His time in Alberta overlapped with the Chena Hotshots by two days, allowing him a quick visit with his son, Emmett, who was on the crew, before Bonds headed back to Alaska. 

Bonds was in the Peace River and Grand Prairie areas in western Alberta June 8-28. It was his first assignment in another country in his 23-year career. 

“I’ve never seen such an international response to an emergency like that,” he said. There are at least 13 countries including Brazil, Spain, France and Portugal that have sent personnel to Canada to help in this fire season. 

Despite almost everybody following the same incident command structure to manage emergencies in their own countries, there were enough differences to warrant having American liaisons for the U.S. firefighters.  

Bonds was there to help deal with minor injuries and vehicle issues, logistics and travel to make sure firefighters get back home. Thankfully, there weren’t any major mishaps to deal with. 

“I spent most of my time driving between incidents where federal firefighting resources were assigned,” Bonds said. “I would visit the local fire centers, ICPs (Incident Command Posts) and attend morning briefings when able so I could face-to-face with folks.” 

He did spend a week at the Alberta Wildfire Coordination Center in Edmonton, where the province-wide response was coordinated. The U.S. firefighters went through their initial in-briefing rhere before being dispatched to fires around the provience. 

“It was very similar to what you see at the AICC (Alaska Interagency Coordination Center) during a busy Alaska fire season,” he said. The AICC at BLM AFS facilities on Fort Wainwright serves as the focal point for initial attack resource coordination, logistics support and predictive services for all state and federal agencies involved in wildland fire management and suppression in Alaska.

For more information, contact BLM AFS Alaska Fire Service Public Affairs Specialist Beth Ipsen at eipsen@blm.gov or (907)356-5510.

Some of the different terms used on Canadian wildfires

Categories: AK Fire Info, BLM Alaska Fire Service

Tags: 2023 Alaska Fire Season, 2023 Canada Wildfire Season