There have been fires in several Canadian provinces for weeks. Thousands of people must be evacuated, hundreds of buildings have already been damaged. Now Canada is counting on help from abroad.
Ottawa/Edmonton. With large wildfires in Canada, more foreign firefighters need to help local authorities. According to the Canadian news agency “Canadian Press”, more than 300 emergency services from the United States and South Africa will arrive in the second largest country in the world in terms of area and help in the provinces of Nova Scotia and Alberta.
According to public broadcaster CBC, more than 2,000 firefighters are deployed in the badly affected region of Alberta alone – 800 of them from the United States, 224 from Australia and New Zealand.
Large areas have been on fire in several Canadian provinces for weeks. In the eastern region of Nova Scotia, more than 16,000 people have recently had to leave their homes, according to the City of Halifax. Estimates earlier this week were that around 200 buildings were damaged. Western Canada has also been battling wildfires for weeks. More than 546 fires have burned more than a million acres in Alberta this year, officials say. This is about two-thirds the size of Schleswig-Holstein. Authorities say the fires were caused by people in more than half of the cases, with 59 fires started by lightning strikes.
With climate change, experts warn that forest fires will become more frequent and more destructive. In Canada’s western prairie provinces, average temperatures have risen 1.9 degrees Celsius since the mid-20th century, according to the Canadian Environment and Climate Change Agency.
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