TWO Bathurst State Emergency Service (SES) volunteers have returned to Australia, having assisted Canada in its battle against its worst wildfires on record.
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Andrew Fletcher and Tony Morris were two of just three SES volunteers from all over Australia sent to Canada to assist with wildfires, with the two undertaking their first international trip with the SES.
Mr Morris only joined the SES less than 12 months ago and was fast tracked into some courses which included logistics.
Not too long later, he was asked to head over to Canada to help assist their firefighters and flew out on May 25 before returning on June 20.
Mr Morris said the conditions in Canada were as bad as some of the worst bushfires in Australia.
"We had SES, Rural Fire Service and and Fire and Rescue over there," he said.
"They had all their people over there, so it was a combination of all the teams coming together and just supporting the firefighters.
"Australia had firefighters over there, as did other countries."
The two SES volunteers don't usually assist with fires, rather they manage floods.
But their roles in incident management allow them to go and work with any other emergency service.
"We both worked in the incident management team," Mr Fletcher said.
"Tony was in the logistics, so we weren't together either. We were about eight hours away from each other."
Mr Fletcher, who was in Canada from May 27-July 1, was based at Camp Kimiwan, an almost four and a half hour drive north-west of Alberta's capital Edmonton.
He was attached to the Western Australian management team and their fire had a front of almost 600 kilometres.
Mr Morris inherited his fire when it was around about 18,000 hectares, but by the time the firefighters had put it out, it had stretched to 32,000 hectares.
"We had to evacuate one Indigenous community on one of the lakes up there, but thankfully we had no loss of life and no loss of assets," he said.
He was based over six hours north of Edmonton at Martin Fire Base, with the nearest settlement the oil town of Fort McMurray.
The pair worked two 14-day shifts, with a two-day break in-between, working up to 14 hours a day
"That was fairly tenuous," Mr Fletcher said.
"By the end you're either mates with everybody or you weren't.
"Certainly at the end of it all, it was time to hand over to somebody else."
The Canadian wildfires begun back in March, but their intensity increased at the start of June.
As the worst wildfire season in recorded Canadian and North American history, 11 of the 13 provinces and territories have been affected, with the worst fires in Alberta, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec.
As of July 13, 4,018 fires had burned 9,419,818 hectares, and of the 908 active wildfires, 573 were deemed "out of control".
Canada has received help not just from Australia but New Zealand, the United States, South Africa, France, Spain, Portugal, Chile and Costa Rica, just to name a few.
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