A Sturgeon County councillor was back on the job this week after spending two weeks fighting wildfires in Australia on his own dime.
Sturgeon County Mayor Alanna Hnatiw took a moment at the start of the Jan. 14 council meeting to commend Coun. Dan Derouin for spending the previous two weeks fighting wildfires in Australia. Derouin, 68, had returned to Canada the previous day.
“While we were all here drinking eggnog and eating turkey, he was flying on his own dime to the other side of the world to do some much-needed work,” Hnatiw said in an interview.
“Dan and residents like Dan are what make Sturgeon County a great community,” she said.
There to help
Record-breaking temperatures and a severe drought have fuelled a series of wildfires in Australia in recent months, the BBC reports. Some 28 people have been killed and about 100,000 square kilometres (an area about twice the size of Nova Scotia) have burned.
About 29 Alberta firefighters are currently deployed in Australia, reports Alberta Wildfire, which is co-ordinating this province’s volunteer fire aid to that nation. None of them are from Sturgeon County, said county fire chief Pat Mahoney.
Derouin, who has 30 years of experience as a firefighter with the City of Edmonton, said he started thinking about volunteering to fight the bushfires in Australia in October, but held off as he was still recovering from knee surgery.
“I wanted to go there and relieve somebody, send somebody home,” he said.
Derouin said he tried to sign up as a official volunteer but was turned down as his expertise was with structural, not forest, fires.
As the fires kept getting worse, he decided to fly to Australia at his own expense on Jan. 1. He told his wife and county council, but didn’t tell one of his three daughters until he was already in flight.
Derouin said he visited the New South Wales Rural Fire Service headquarters in Sydney on arrival and checked in with the Alberta volunteer co-ordinator, who suggested he help out the local Salvation Army.
When he found out the Salvation Army office had closed for the holidays, Derouin said he decided to just drive towards the fires to help out on the front lines. That proved to be a mistake, as the smoke was so thick that day you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Returning the next day, he linked up with the regional fire command in Cooma about 400 km south of Sydney, who had him join crews in Adaminaby, 53 km to the northwest.
“I was their only international firefighter,” Derouin said.
On the front lines
Derouin said he spent the next two weeks hauling trees and dousing hot spots with hundreds of volunteers in the Adaminaby region – a place of thick forest, rolling hills, and roads that were often little more than wandering cutlines. Cars everywhere were blackened with ash, and the air was always thick with smoke.
Derouin said Australia’s fires were too big to put out, so in most cases crews simply tried to contain them. Crews would work 10 to 18 hours a day, often in 44 C weather.
“These guys haven’t seen blue skies for a couple of weeks,” he said, and were worn down mentally.
Derouin said community members had banded together to support the firefighters, providing free lunches, beers, and (in his case) motel stays. He got to know several firefighters pretty well, and even had a beer with former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, who was a firefighter in the area.
Derouin discouraged Albertans from doing what he did, saying he put Alberta’s official volunteers there in a difficult position. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, which manages Canada’s international fire aid agreements, said earlier this month that Australia was not seeking Canadian volunteers to fight the bushfires, and that the people Canada was sending over were handpicked experts in their fields.
Derouin said he was sad to leave Adaminaby, where the fires still burned this week.
“It was like I was abandoning them.”
Derouin said he gave a Canadian flag to the crews in Adaminaby and hoped to return there in a few years.
Derouin said he hoped his efforts helped, and that he was able to show the Australians that Canada had their back.
“There’s not a firefighter out there that doesn’t feel the same as I do.”
