Ash Morrow spied flames and smoke higher and wider than the eye could see. It was June 2023. The 25-year-old Australian with the volunteer Rural Fire Service (RFS) in New South Wales was putting out wildfires in the northern Canadian province of Alberta, not too far from the Arctic Circle.
“It was a baptism of fire,” he says. “Literally.”
Morrow is sitting in a room at the RFS headquarters in the Sydney suburb of Homebush. Stubble covers his cheeks. The knockabout police officer from a farm near Orange is wearing a hi-vis yellow RFS uniform; the arrow on the fire chart behind him is pointed to the dark red segment marked CATASTROPHE.
Morrow was one of 627 firefighters from Australia who flew overseas to help the Canadians tame the biggest wildfires in their recorded history. By September, 6,396 infernos had burned through 17.5m hectares (43.43m acres) of woodland. Morrow was on his second Canadian deployment.
“Canada was basically a massive tinderbox,” says Morrow. “Usually, one province at a time will get smashed. This time, the whole country was stretched thin. There were fires everywhere.”
Australian firefighters are at the forefront of international cooperation to deal with the Flame Age. Alliances are required as nations battle wildfire seasons that their own emergency services cannot combat alone. In Canada, Australians were joined by New Zealanders, Americans, Mexicans and South Africans. But this sharing of the load is becoming endangered by the vanishing window between fire seasons across the globe.
“We’ve been sending firefighters to North America since 2000,” says the commissioner of the RFS, Rob Rogers. “There used to be a distinctive difference between the fire seasons of the northern and southern hemispheres. That’s becoming quite blurred.”
The Australian contingent in Canada included an RFS group captain named Andrew Callaghan. I meet Callaghan, 50, at a cafe in Rouse Hill, north-western Sydney. His cheeks are clean-shaven; his body language is apprehensive. The stoic second-generation firefighter is built like a brick outhouse, but reluctant to blow his own trumpet.
“I try to avoid doing interviews like the plague,” he says.
Inspired by his father – a life member of the RFS – Callaghan has been fighting fires for more than 20 years. He was a brigade captain in the RFS during the 2019-20 black summer bushfires. Yet he was still shocked by the size of the Canadian wildfires and the speed with which the blazes spread between trees.
“It was a bit different,” he says. “Fire over here coming up through the bush sounds like a freight train. Fire over there sounds like a jet engine.”
The Canadians fought fires in unfamiliar ways; there were no trusty red trucks. They drove utes, with a portable hose and pump in the tray. The hoses sucked up water from the nearest available source to douse the escalating flames.
“Fire’s fire,” says Callaghan. “There’s three sides to the fire triangle – heat, fuel and oxygen. Remove one of those, it’s good to go. You can do that anywhere in the world.”
The trees in Canada lacked tap roots; they lit up quicker and fell over with a frightening abruptness. Morrow describes them as “widowmakers”. One of the main sources of fatalities for firefighters in Canada is falling trees.
They weren’t the only enigmatic occupational hazard. On Morrow’s first deployment to Canada, he received a security briefing about bears. It proved prophetic. A crew of firefighters accidentally set up camp in a bear den.
“Long story short, we had a bit of a problem bear,” says Morrow.
The firefighters tried to scare off the bear with a chainsaw, but ran out of fuel. Morrow – an aviation specialist – organised for a helicopter to airlift the stranded firefighters to safety. The chopper landed just as a big black bear was descending on them after snatching their eskies and defecating everywhere.
“That was interesting,” he says. “I don’t think you can prepare for that.”
Callaghan received the same security briefings as Morrow about how to discriminate between a black bear and a brown bear. Apparently, black bears could be brown, and brown bears could be black – the only foolproof way to tell the difference was a divot in the bear’s nose and the shape of its ears.
“Mate, if I’m close enough to a bear to notice the shape of its ears, I’m already screwed,” says Callaghan, with an incredulous grin.
Morrow and Callaghan laugh about certain aspects of the deployment now, but it placed serious strain on the firefighters involved. In a foreign country, they fought fires from 7am to 9pm for 12 days straight, followed by a two-day break. This was followed by another gruelling 12-day rotation.
The risks hit close to home when there was a fatal helicopter crash at a neighbouring fire.
“It’s difficult to sleep,” says Morrow. “The sun is up until 11.30pm. Fatigue affects everything. It’s just more and more things building on top.”
Morrow spent about 120 hours in the air, where seismic exploration lines made the Canadian countryside look like a waffle. He was startled by the sight of massive oil and gas fields surrounded by wildfires and smoke plumes.
“They’re perfectly safe, apparently,” he says, laughing nervously. “But I wasn’t used to seeing these massive oils reserves in the middle of a fire.”
The Australians were amazed by the elite techniques of the North Americans; the North Americans were amazed the Australians were unpaid volunteers back home. For Morrow and Callaghan, the volunteer basis of the RFS is a point of pride. Morrow signed up at 16, and later joined the police force.
“You can’t arrest a fire, unfortunately,” he says.
Callaghan works for NSW Health. To fight fires in Canada, he used leave that had been frozen during Covid-19. He would FaceTime his wife and kids at 10.30pm, while the smoky sky was still light. But for him, the trip was a no-brainer; a way to repay Canadians who came to Australia, and may come again.
“This was an opportunity for me to help out our international friends who helped us out in 2019,” he says. “So I put my hat in the ring.”
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It is easy to underestimate the catastrophic impact of the Canadian wildfires. The death toll stands at six, compared with 34 for Australia’s black summer fires. The flames – if not the smoke – were relatively isolated from large cities.
But there are terrifying implications for the fight against climate change. The wildfires have released 2bn tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, roughly triple Canada’s annual emissions, undoing recent cuts in one fell swoop.
The carbon sink of Canada’s forests have turned into a “super-emitter”.
“If wildfires were a country, they would be the world’s fourth largest emitter,” says David Wallace-Wells, a climate columnist for the New York Times.
Scientists see the wildfires as an example of a “tipping point”. Even if emissions from other sources were dramatically reduced overnight, Canada’s wildfires may compensate with feedback loops that do not just negate the cuts, but outweigh them, thus increasing the likelihood of more fires – ad infinitum.
“We are creating the fire equivalent of an ice age,” Stephen Pyne, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, told the Washington Post.
Morrow and Callaghan had been back barely a month when New South Wales was hit by a heatwave. The Bureau of Meteorology declared an El Niño while bushfires kicked off across the country.
“The way things are looking at the moment, it could be a busy season,” says Morrow. “It’s unseasonably hot for this time of the year. From my point of view back out around Orange, there’s a massive amount of fuel on the ground.”
Callaghan didn’t dwell on the experience too much when he got home from Canada; there was too much to do, and too much to come. He went back to work at NSW Health. And he picked up where he left off with the RFS.
“I’ve been doing this for so long now,” he says. “You move on.”
Last week, Callaghan’s division had a truck ready to dispatch to the northern outskirts of Sydney. He resists “looking into a crystal ball” about the summer ahead. But he believes that the country is better prepared, whatever happens. The RFS has purchased equipment and assets that might otherwise be sourced from overseas.
“In the last 60 years, the fire season in the south-east of New South Wales has gotten a hundred days longer,” says Rogers. “We’re well and truly into our fire season now.”
