Cape Town - South Africa will once again be sending a large contingent of firefighters to Alberta in Canada, as over 170 wildfires continue to ravage the region, resulting in thousands of evacuations.
Over 200 firefighters and a management team from the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment’s Working on Fire (WoF) programme, will leave on Saturday.
WoF is an Expanded Public Works programme launched in 2003, aimed at providing work opportunities to young persons.
The team will depart via a charter arranged by the Canadian Inter-agency Forest Fire Centre from the Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport in Mbombela. The deployment is expected to last 39 days, inclusive of travel and rest days.
For Jacqwin Klaase, a 29-year-old firefighter from the Porterville base, this will be his third deployment and will see him serving as a first aider.
“I have followed this fire the whole time when I was on leave. I'm prepared and was keeping myself fit. Firefighting in Canada is a lot different because they’re dealing with underground fires, which the media calls zombie fires because they don’t stop burning or don’t easily stop, especially underground,” Klaase said.
On Monday, the team travelled to the Kishugu Training Academy in Mbombela, Mpumalanga, for a three-day training camp and final preparation.
The deployment marks the sixth of its kind since 2015, and was made at the urgent request of the Canadian fire centre in terms of a Memorandum of Understanding between Canada and South Africa signed in 2019.
WoF Kishugu joint venture stakeholder relations manager Linton Rensburg said: “A total of 215 firefighters from the South African WoF programme are busy making final preparations as they will be flying out to Canada to assist with all the wildfires that are currently raging in that country. This is the sixth time that the WoF programme has deployed firefighters to Canada, and it comes at the back of the historic deployment in 2023, when just over 860 of our South African firefighters from WoF were deployed to Canada.”
WoF said the deployment would not have any adverse impacts on firefighting deployments in South Africa as just over 5 000 of its firefighters would remain at bases throughout the country.
According to a National Fire Situation Report for July 24, the country was on National Preparedness level 5, with a demand for resources through the Canadian Inter-agency Forest Fire Centre listed as extreme.
The availability of national resources was limited and international resources were being mobilised.
The report noted that the potential for emerging significant wildland fires was high to extreme and expected to remain so in one or multiple agencies.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the Canadian Armed Forces resources, evacuations support and more emergency wildfire resources would be deployed to the province of Alberta following its request for federal assistance.
Cape Argus