Canadian students help fight record wildfires during summer break

The BC Wildfire Service says it employs about 1,600 seasonal personnel each year, and about a third are post-secondary students working during their summer vacation.

When Reese Lange was in kindergarten, she dreamed of joining the police. But it was in high school that she realized her true calling.

The 21-year-old is now part of an army of young men and women, many of them college students, who are spending their summer battling what could be one of Canada’s worst fire seasons on record.

They are drawn together by a sense of duty and comradeship.

But the risks they face were brought home last week by the death in British Columbia of Devyn Gale, a nursing student. Aged just 19, Gale was already in her third summer as a wildland firefighter when she was crushed by a falling tree as her team battled an out-of-control blaze near her hometown of Revelstoke in the southern Interior.

Lange is undergoing firefighting training at Lakeland College in Vermilion, central Alberta, but has already seen action battling blazes in the province this summer. She said Gale’s death was “devastating” but only made her more determined.

“I feel like it makes me want to be a firefighter more and kind of learn more so that I can protect myself and my teammates,” said Lange.

She said the tragedy had bonded her class of 31 student firefighters, underscoring their shared goals of saving lives and watching each other’s backs.

The BC Wildfire Service said in a statement that it employs about 1,600 seasonal personnel each year, and about a third are post-secondary students working during their summer vacation.