Kōrero with Mirren Allan

Kerry Gregory headed into our National Coordination Centre (NCC) to kōrero with Mirren Allan about our recent international deployments.

Mirren Allan is a Senior Advisor Community Readiness and Recovery by day and also volunteers as Response Manager in NCC.

Our people in NCC have been busy organising two deployments (known as Alpha and Bravo) to Canada to support their significant wildfire response. As well as a small team, Zulu, to the USA.

The Alpha contingent left New Zealand on July 21 and was made up of helicopter coordinators, division supervisors, operations branch directors and a liaison officer and deployed to British Columbia. They returned homed 24 August.

The Bravo contingent left New Zealand on 30 July for Alberta. The team of 21 firefighters had been carrying out arduous firefighting on multiple wildfires, the largest being around 12,000 hectares. They returned home 2 September.

The Zulu contingent remain in the USA and will be returning next week.

International deployments are an important part of what we do, supporting our partner countries in their time of need, as they do for us in return. The deployments serve as an opportunity for our people to not only assist the response to these fires but practice their skills and gain further experience in challenging conditions.