Eighteen-year-old Hunter Sousa from Maine celebrated his high school graduation by hopping in a truck and heading to Nova Scotia to fight the biggest forest fire in the province’s history.
Sousa works for the Maine forest service as an on-call firefighter, but had never before fought a fire. The call from his superior came on a Thursday.
“They said they'd be meeting in Bangor Friday night and I had my graduation Friday night, so I graduated and got my diploma, and headed to Bangor and met with the rest of the crew, and then we headed to Nova Scotia,” he said in a recent interview.
In Sousa’s case, his main duty at the Barrington Lake fire, in Nova Scotia’s southwest, consisted of mapping the extent of the fire by walking around the edge of the burned sector—called the “black”—and marking the perimeter in an app on his phone, as well as putting out the occasional hot spot.
Flores was dispatched to Quebec’s Mauricie region, in an area near a First Nations village that can only be accessed by helicopter. During a recent phone interview, Flores said that while the area is wet and swampy, the fire travels through root systems underground, and even under water.
“Despite the fact that we have our feet in the water, it’s burning,” he said.
“Since there are immense trees, the fire takes on inconceivable views very quickly because once the fire starts to come out of the soil, it attacks the trees, it rises to the top and you have trees of 30, 40 metres and that’s how you have big fires that start very, very quickly,” he said.
“Sometimes they’re getting eaten alive.”
One of the largest contingents is made up of 400 people from South Africa, who are deployed to Alberta and working shifts of 14 days straight, followed by four days off.
Vincent Lubisi, a strike team leader, has said the South Africans have had to learn how to fight fires in a country with different vegetation and climates.
In Edson, Alta., where he’s been working, he said the focus is on securing the perimeters of the fire and slowly working inward.
“In South Africa, they fight the fire more directly,” he said.
The contingent includes coordinators such as Antoinette Jini, who helps organize teams on the ground, making sure the assignments are understood and the proper information gets conveyed.
“We have built the relationship and we’ve learned many things while we’re engaging and collaborating,” she said in a recent interview.