Over 600 American firefighters battling Canadian wildfires; roughly 16 million acres burned
According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, there have been more than 3,700 fires this season, trailing only 2023 as the most severe ever, and scorching roughly 16 million acres.
"It's an unfortunate reality," Shannon Graf, wildfire information officer for the Government of the Northwest Territories, lamented to WCCO News. "If we could stop the smoke we'd be stopping it here real quick."
Many out-of-control fires are in the Northwest Territories, a massive expanse that borders Alaska. Hundreds of other blazes are raging in the provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, just to the northwest of Minnesota.
"We've got crews from out of the territory and from out of the country," Graf explained. "We've got helicopters, we've got airplanes. We've got crews on the ground. We've got incident management teams running all of these crews. Basically, we are working our people as much and as best we can while still keeping them healthy."
More than 600 American firefighters have traveled to Canada this summer to help battle those wildfires, the U.S. Forest Service reported last month. Officials at the CIFFC said crews have also flown in from Mexico, Chile and Australia, among other nations.
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