Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has paid tribute to a young firefighter who was killed while battling a forest blaze in British Columbia, as wildfires continue to rage across the country and the western province requested an extra 1,000 international firefighters.
Devyn Gale, 19, was part of a team that was tackling a fire outside the town of Revelstoke, about 310 miles (500km) north-east of Vancouver. Revelstoke Royal Canadian Mounted Police said she had been clearing brush in a remote area where a small fire had started. She lost contact with her team and was discovered caught under a fallen tree.
“Yesterday, while working a fire, my sister Devyn was struck by a tree and killed,” Gale’s brother Nolan Gale posted on Instagram. “I’m grateful for everything she’s done for me and others, completely out of kindness with no expectation for reciprocation. She truly didn’t deserve this.
“Devyn was an amazing sister. She was so kind and thoughtful. She had the best head on her shoulders between herself, my other sister ... and I. She was careful, considerate, hardworking. She was smarter and better at what she did than she gave herself credit for,” he wrote.
“I’m so grateful to have grown up beside her. I’m grateful for everything she’s done for me and others, completely out of kindness with no expectation for reciprocation.”
The firefighter was airlifted to hospital but succumbed to her injuries, the police statement said.
In a tweet on Friday, Trudeau wrote: “The news from British Columbia – that one of the firefighters bravely battling wildfires has lost her life – is heartbreaking. At this incredibly difficult time, I’m sending my deepest condolences to her family, her friends and her fellow firefighters.”
The British Columbia premier, David Eby, said in a statement the death was a “tremendous loss for everyone involved with the BC Wildfire Service at an already challenging time”.
Fatalities are relatively rare among Canadian wildfire fighters.
The last such death in British Columbia was in 2015, when firefighter John Phare was killed after being struck by a falling tree during a blaze on the province’s Sunshine Coast. Five years earlier, Tim Whiting and Brian Tilley, two air tanker pilots, died in a plane crash near the town of Lytton.
Canada’s minister of emergency preparedness, Bill Blair, said Gale’s death “is a tragic reminder of the risks our firefighters are facing”.
Canada is on track for its worst-ever wildfire season with fires also raging in large swaths of eastern Canada, while wildfire emissions have hit record highs.
In Quebec, the Canadian military is being deployed to help with emergency evacuations in the north of the province, the federal emergency preparedness minister, Bill Blair, said on Friday.
In British Columbia, some 2,000 firefighters are battling more than 350 fires.
Authorities have requested an extra 1,000 international firefighters to help tackle blazes that have burned 1.2m hectares of forest in the province so far this year, far above the 10-year average of 76,000 hectares.
Lack of rain in recent months has left much British Columbia parched, in what officials say is an “unprecedented” level of drought for this early in the year.
Hot weather is forecast to persist across much of the province and thunderstorms are likely to bring more lightning strikes that will spark more fires, Cliff Chapman, director of provincial operations for BC Wildfire, said in a media briefing on Thursday.
“We have seen more fire on the landscape in terms of number of starts than in previous years at this point in time,” Chapman said, adding there have been 51,000 lightning strikes in the last week alone.
