The BC Wildfire Service will be losing hundreds of its wildland firefighters next week as the fall post-secondary semester gets underway, but the agency says it’s business as usual.
Donna MacPherson, BCWS fire information officer, said the transition happens every year and the wildfire service is prepared for it.
“A lot of the people that choose to go, come and help us, are also university students, so this is a fairly normal and natural part of our business,” she said.
She said the agency employs about 2,000 firefighters and support personnel, and is expecting 400 to leave in the coming days and weeks.
"On average, we expect 20 to 30 per cent of our auxiliary staff to leave to go back to school. This year, it's just under 20 per cent," MacPherson said.
University student personnel are supplemented with other unit crews available to BCWS.
“We have access to a lot of troops, we've got, obviously, the other country ones, we also have contracting companies,” MacPherson said.
“We usually get our incident management personnel from out of country, if they need to — other agencies that work like we do with the same kind of standards to be able to direct people safely.”
MacPherson said turnovers are conducted throughout the summer, and with the addition of other available crews the transition should be business as usual.
“We do turnovers all the time. So if we know that there's going to be a shortfall, we'll be sending them up as they come because our crews go to a fire, they stay for a period of time and they leave,” she said.
“That kind of rhythm, it's been happening this entire summer.”
MacPherson said new crews are sent to the fires before the others leave so that they can learn what has been done before swapping positions and carrying the work forward.
Occasionally, she said, the university student may ask to extend their stay with the agency and ask for a letter to be provided to their school’s registrar.
“We know a lot of our people go to school, and their school is important to us,” MacPherson said.
“So we're not going to interfere with that at all. It's usually the students themselves that would like us to to provide them with something for some reason.”
