Utahns Soon to Fight Australian Fires
By Ben Winslow Deseret Morning News
Mark Mattfeldt is packing his bags and heading for Australia.
The Bureau of Land Management employee is not going there for a vacation. He’s being drafted to help fight a series of gargantuan bushfires raging across that country.
“I had no inkling this would occur,” he said in an interview with the Deseret Morning News Thursday. “I’d always sort of considered it that they do have a fire season that’s opposite of ours but never thought I’d find myself there.”
The Eastern Great Basin Interagency Fire Center is putting together a hotshot crew of BLM and Forest Service employees from Utah, Idaho and Nevada. A “hotshot” crew is a group of firefighters specially trained to go into extreme terrain and fight long-lasting fires.
“They requested hotshot crews,” said Kathy Jo Pollock with the U.S. Forest Service. “We’re kind of off-season, so we’re putting together a crew called the Eastern Great Basin Hotshots.”
The firefighters and support staff from the region will leave Saturday and be in Australia for at least 34 days. Through a cooperative agreement between the U.S. and Australian governments, firefighters have been shared in times of need.
In 2000, Pollock said Australian firefighters were in Utah helping battle wildfires.
“It’ll be probably the first time a lot of them have gone internationally,” she said of the Utah firefighters being sent down under. “The fuel types are going to be different. The wildlife is certainly going to be different.”
In Australia’s Victoria State, nearly 2.5 million acres of land have gone up in flames. Some of the fires have been burning since November. While bushfires happen every year, Australian officials have said recent drought has exacerbated the situation. Temperatures have recently reached up to 104 degrees.
Mattfeldt said he is expecting a rough time.
“I’m expecting probably very high temperatures and relatively extreme conditions,” he said. “Different fuel types from what we see in the West, and as aggressive and intense as our fire seasons get.”
E-mail: bwinslow@desnews.com
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