A Penticton wildland engines and tactical tenders team designed for firefighting was called down to Washington state on Thursday to help the fight against massive fires there.
Warren Kipp, the owner of WeHaulH2O, is sending his crew to the northeast part of Washington, south of Grand Forks.
"As you know, there's substantial fires there and most of the assets have been drawn off to the coast, where there's a lot of residents ... so it's left the interior areas kind of scrambling,” Kipp said. “Their department of natural resources requested us to come on down.”
The Cold Springs fire started Sunday just south of Omak, Wash., and is currently close to 70,000 hectares in size. Kipp reached out to offer help once he saw the fires breaking out.
The tactical water tender they are bringing is a military vehicle built for on and off road use, retrofitted to fight wildfires, using foam integration and water cannons.
“We are going to be helping incident command in the deployment of the fire attack. We'll likely get staged with a four pack or eight pack crew on the ground.”
Kipp is expecting to send in rotating two-man crews, estimated to be there about a week.
“They have lots of fires to deal with, and it's very possible that we could be on one incident and rolled off to another.”
WeHaulH20 is registered to work in both Canada and the United States, but this is the first time it has been called down since the border closure happened due to COVID-19.
“There's a lot of people to be thankful for, mainly the whole border is shut down and homeland security and border services has come through in the case of an emergency. There's procedure and process to get people down to help,” Kipp said.
He outlined that his crews have COVID safety measures and procedures in place that are easy to manage with his small team.
Wildfires continue to burn throughout the west coast of the United States, in Washington, Oregon and California.
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