A KIARA fire station officer is back in the City of Swan after supporting Canadian crews in one of their country’s worst wildfire seasons.

Kiara fire station officer Ian Dunne was assigned task force team leader during his time in Canada as part of a group of 20 from Perth made up of DFES and Parks and Wildlife staff and volunteers.

Mr Dunne said deployment was physically and mentally demanding and his team worked long days in Canada’s dense forests using techniques very different to those used back at home.

“In Western Australia, I think that we do a really good job at how we get on top of fires here and wildfires,” he said.

“We use a lot of machine work close to the fire edge, and that gets it under control just as quickly and probably quicker, I would suggest.

“(Canadian firefighters) really compartmentalise the fire in and use a lot of physical, manual labour to try and put the edges out.

“But it is a different landscape, and that has a big bearing on (techniques used).”

Mr Dunne said soft soils limited the use of heavy machinery and backburning was restricted as timber is an important economic resource and tall conifers could cause unexpected fire to spread.

“They don’t do controlled burning the same way that we do,” he said.

“The forest there is a resource from a timber industry point of view, and if the burning gets out of control, then it is difficult for them to deal with it.

“Also, even in the wintertime or even in the milder fire conditions, the fire can change quite dramatically over there because the understory is so terribly dry, and the internals of the trees are quite dry as well, so they can candle up and drop over fire edges.

“I think that the prescribed burning that we do here suits the landscape effectively and does make a difference.”

Mr Dunne said he was grateful his team didn’t have any run-ins with bears, and he found the preconceived notions about dangerous Australian wildlife amusing in comparison.

“Look, I’d love to tell good bear stories (but) we didn’t see too many bears, thankfully,” he said.

“The brown bear is probably one of the most common ones in that part of the world, but next door in British Columbia, there was an altercation with a bear of which the firefighter managed to wrangle them off a little bit and come up somewhat unscathed.

“It just kind of showed the fact that when in Canada, the Canadians think that WA is scary with spiders and snakes and those sorts of things, and then when we look across the border at moose and grizzly bears, well, we’ve probably got a different viewpoint.”