Minnesota firefighters return from battling Canadian wildfires: "Some of the worst I've ever seen"

CBS News

3 days ago

Minnesotans are once again answering the call to help with the massive response to the ongoing Canadian wildfires.
"Some of the worst I've ever seen by the sheer size of the fires," Joe Meyer, an advanced fire training specialist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, recalled to WCCO. "Just to see the walls of fire that were 100 feet over the treetops and a mile long and tearing through the forest up there. It was amazing to see it actually."
Meyer, a 30-year veteran at the DNR, was among a crew of 20 DNR firefighters who just returned from a two-week rotation in northern Manitoba.
They were the third such crew sent from Minnesota this summer; a fourth team will depart later this month.
"We were up in Lynn Lake, Manitoba, and the two fires that we had up there. One was 200,000 acres and the other was 35,000 acres," Meyer explained. "I was the operations section chief up there and basically I had to fly around the fire, formulate a plan for the firefighters on the ground."
According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, there have been more than 4,400 fires this season, trailing only 2023 as the most severe ever, and scorching more than 18.5 million acres.
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.
The smoke from those fires, meanwhile, continues to billow and pollute skies thousands of miles away across the border.
"I guess the biggest message would be is it's not Canada's fault," Meyer added. "They're not getting rain up there. There's a lot of fire up there."
The U.S. Forest Service has dispatched roughly 700 American firefighters to Canada this summer but have since re-deployed those teams across the western U.S. as fires rage in places like Nevada, California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming.
The DNR crews in Canada are coordinating through a separate agreement called the Great Lakes Forest Fire Compact, wherein the states of Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin formed a resource-sharing partnership with the provinces of Ontario and Manitoba.
Earlier this year, Ontario sent an engine crew to aid Minnesota as wildland fires ripped through parts of St. Louis County.
"We have a lot of young people in DNR forestry and wildland firefighting," Blair Olson, a DNR firefighting specialist, explained to WCCO. "When we're sending personnel to Manitoba this year and previous years, we're gaining tremendous experience and training opportunities. Working in new environments."
Americans and Canadians are working together — and they're not alone, either. Firefighters from a several other countries have sent teams to Canada from nearly every continent.
"I had folk from 20-person crews from Mexico," Meyer explained. "I know they had people from Australia coming to help. There are so many fires up there that they are spread so thin that they're asking for help."