Mexico Sends Another Contingent to Help Fight Canadian Forest Fires Mexico News Daily
go to original July 7, 2023

Mexican firefighters arriving in Canada to fight wildfires (Conafor)

Mexico sent a second team of firefighters to Canada this week to help combat the wildfires currently blazing through Canada’s forests.

The group of 100 firefighters and two technicians traveled from Guadalajara, Jalisco, via Vancouver to the Prince George area of British Columbia, a province in western Canada. They were sent in response to a request for international support from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).

“On instructions from President Andrés Manual López Obrador, who recognizes the complex situation that Canada is going through in the face of forest fires in that country, and building on a solid foundation of bilateral cooperation, Mexico responded positively to a new request,” the Foreign Affairs Ministry (SRE) said in a statement on Wednesday.

The statement stressed that the firefighters have “the experience, physical fitness and training required to stay in the field for the period that is necessary, adhering to international standards to execute the tasks of control and extinction of forest fires.”

This is the second contingent of Mexican firefighters sent to Canada this year. The first group of 200 traveled to Ontario, in eastern Canada, on June 19. They are currently deployed in the areas of Dryden and Sudbury, where they are installing water pumping systems, tracking hotspots, opening fire breaches and directly fighting the flames.

Meanwhile, Mexico has been gripped by successive heat waves and historically low rainfall. It has also seen sporadic forest fires in areas such as Guadalajara, but nothing on the scale of the fires in Canada.

Read the rest at Mexico News Daily

Related: What 120 Degrees Looks Like in One of Mexico’s Hottest Cities (The New York Times)

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