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A cohort of Canadian wildfire firefighters recently returned to the frozen tundra, after a stint down under helping fight the out-of-control bushfires raging across Australia.

On Jan. 9, Morgan Kehr, director of wildfire operations with Alberta Wildfire, landed back in Edmonton after spending 39 days in New South Wales, a state that’s been seeing the brunt of the wildfire destruction.

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Kehr was part of a group of 21 Canadian firefighters who arrived in Australia at the start of December and said the reception from Australians was amazing.

“No matter where you went if people saw our uniforms or heard our accents, they would stop and thank us.”

Kehr’s role in Australia was serving as a deployment liaison officer. The Canadian firefighters were mainly in incident management roles, helping with the logistics of fighting the fires. Some are also helping with the aviation units.

“They were operations chiefs, plans chiefs, aircraft managers. And then some of them were airtac supervisors which did quite a bit of flying directing, tanker bombers and aircraft on the fires,” Kehr said.