The 95-page report used interviews from the surviving firefighter, fire managers, and other crew members working nearby fires to gain a complete understanding of the events that led to the firefighters’ deaths, according to department officials. Other data used in the report included dispatch logs, remotely-sensed data and physical evidence from the scene of the entrapment.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Firefighters killed near Colorado-Utah border were waiting for helicopter pickup when burnover overtook them, latest investigation details show

Officials determined that the crew only had nine seconds between learning the helicopter they requested to rescue them could not land and needing to deploy their fire shelters. The Knowles Fire, which merged with the nearby Snyder Mesa, Jones and Gore fires, spread more than 7 miles over complex broken mesa and canyon topography in under three hours, which witnesses described as “shocking” and “unfathomable.” Sustained winds of 25 to 30 mph with gusts up to 40 mph persisted for hours.

“An Air Attack with more than 30 years of experience was ‘shocked’ at the run the Snyder, Jones and Dolores
Fires made on June 27th,” the report said. “The fires’ tendency to spot over natural barriers that day was unlike anything the fire management organization had previously experienced … For some, it was the windiest day they had ever experienced on a fire, or, indeed, at all. One experienced firefighter described it as less like normal fire spread and more ‘like a storm, sweeping with the wind’ over the landscape.”

Heavy smoke made it impossible for the crew’s requested helicopter to land safely, according to the report. A helicopter was eventually able to return to the site two and a half hours after the burnover and found the two surviving firefighters, one of whom would die from their injuries later. A second helicopter landed at the scene minutes later and confirmed there were no other survivors.

The report included 19 numbered findings, but listed no blame or recommendations to avoid similar situations in the future.

“No single decision or system failure fully explains the outcome. Instead, the events reveal the cumulative effects of known limitations operating under extraordinary tempo and conditions,” officials said in the report. “By documenting and analyzing these interactions with care and honesty, the team seeks to equip firefighters, managers, dispatchers, and aviation personnel with clearer insight so that similar sequences may be recognized and interrupted in the future.”

Click here to read the full report.

The Wildfire Resilience Hub streamlines access to the Association’s wildfire programs, training opportunities, practical tools, and technical expertise, representatives said in a press release. The resources include:

• Wildfire programs supporting community wildfire preparedness, mitigation, and resilience.
• Resources and tools such as practical guides, publications, templates and educational materials.
• Training and education materials like webinars, workshops, and professional development opportunities.
• Technical assistance like expert guidance and support.
• Community solutions like successful initiatives, best practices, and lessons learned from other communities.
• News, events, and funding opportunities.

People interested in accessing the resources must be signed up through the Association’s Ready, Set, Go! Program. Membership is free and can be completed online.

“The Wildfire Resilience Hub supports a more connected approach to wildfire preparedness by bringing programs, education, resources, and technical assistance together in one platform,” Association representatives said in a press release. “By improving access to information and encouraging collaboration among fire departments, government agencies, and community organizations, the Hub helps partners identify practical solutions, strengthen preparedness efforts, and build more wildfire-resilient communities.

Click here to access the hub.

The latest crash happened on Sunday during a firefighting operation in the Barito River waters of Tabatan Village, in the Kuripan District of South Kalimantan, according to Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency. Emergency officials initially claimed that all of the helicopter’s crew members were safe, but later said initial reports were incorrect, and instead only two crew members, one Australian and one New Zealander, were found injured and have since been hospitalized.

Emergency crews have since confirmed that Helicopter Landing Officer Yayan Supyansuri died in the crash.

[UPDATE: This article originally reported information that both injured crew were Australian.]

That crash happened four days after another water-bombing helicopter crashed in the Seruyan Regency of Central Kalimantan during a firefighting operation, killing three Indonesian crew members and injuring several others, the Agency said. Those killed in that crash included:

• Lieutenant Colonel Dudi Firmansyah
• Captain Nurhafiz Akbar
• First Sergeant Heri Prasetyo

“The dedication, service, and spirit shown by the deceased in carrying out humanitarian duties will always remain a part of our collective endeavor to protect the public from the threat of disasters,” the Agency said in a social media post.

The pilots injured in the first crash were part of a broader mission by the Australian Government to offer support to Indonesian crews fighting the fires, smoke from which has lowered air quality in Australia. The Government deployed 20 specialist aviation personnel from the New South Wales Rural Fire Service, along with a C-130 Hercules Large Air Tanker and a Cessna Citation, which acted as a scout aircraft, according to the Agency. The deployment was scheduled to last from Nov. 6 to Nov. 12.

Air pollution from Indonesia’s wildfire smoke has killed an estimated 3,500 people in the country, and continues to worsen air quality in neighboring nations to “unhealthy” and even “hazardous” levels, according to a recent analysis from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

READ MORE: Over 3,500 killed from Indonesia wildfires’ air pollution

“Firewave” describes a series of urban wildfires within a short period of time, usually due to extended periods of hot and dry weather. The definition is listed in the international Collins Dictionary, which listed the term as a runner-up for its “Word of the Year” for 2026.

The term was coined by researchers at Imperial College London in 2025 and speaks to the growing impact of climate change, representatives of the dictionary said in a blog post.

“Think heatwave, but with added peril, and scientists warned this year that cities are increasingly at risk,” the post said.

The researchers coined the term after a series of extreme heatwaves across the United Kingdom, which severely affected London in particular and caused the London Fire Brigade’s busiest day since World War II. They identified vapour pressure deficit, the atmosphere’s ability to extract moisture from the land surface, as a much more accurate indicator and driver of wildfires than either humidity or temperature.

They also created the concept of “firewaves” to help forecast and predict times when similar urban wildfire outbreaks may occur and prepare officials accordingly.

“It is hoped that the results will be of operational value to the LFB, and lay the foundation for further work investigating the role of heatwaves and VPD in increasing wildfire hazards in cities and other urban environments worldwide,” researchers said in the paper they published in the Springer Nature Link academic journal of Fire Technology.

Click here to read the full study.

No personal protective equipment.

No water.

No fire trucks.

Rocks thrown at you while fighting fires.

All these scenarios and more have been reported by Kenyan firefighters as routine occurrences when addressing fires. But for more than a decade, an organization called Africa Fire Mission has been working in collaboration with multiple stakeholders in Kenya to change this reality and make fighting fire safer all across Africa.

In 2025, as two University of Kentucky College of Communication and Information researchers we connected with Africa Fire Mission on a research study. We wanted to understand how high reliability organizations (HROs), which are organizations with human life and well-being on the line, operate safely and reliably even in under-resourced or fiscally challenging environments.

In Kenya, despite a multitude of organizational, personal, and community challenges, Africa Fire Mission has led successful efforts to train firefighters in fire safety practices despite these identified limitations.  

The initial findings of this research partnership were presented at the 2026 Wildland Fire Canada Conference and Canadian Smoke Forum in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, last week. The study identifies five specific values cultivated through Africa Fire Mission training programs that promote safety practices in the fire service. These identified values include (a) knowledge sharing, (b) collaborative leadership, (c) enthusiastic learning, (d) shared purpose, and (e) community impact.

Although these values identified are largely familiar to most individuals working in the U.S. fire and emergency services, these findings are notable when contrasted with Kenyan knowledge distribution culture described by participants. Participants in the study indicated that in the past, knowledge has been perceived and treated as a tangible asset in many of their Kenyan communities, including the fire and emergency services. From this perspective, firefighting and emergency service knowledge was regarded as a source of power, status, and job security that should be closely guarded rather than shared with peers or other colleagues. Because knowledge has a tangible value in this cultural context, sharing knowledge (such as that from a training program) was viewed as giving away something with significant, tangible value. By holding knowledge close, those with knowledge could maintain their exclusive access to power, status and job security that others without that knowledge did not possess.

Importantly, exposure to AFM trainers and training programs represented a shift in these knowledge-sharing norms for many Kenyan fire and emergency service team members. AFM’s training models, which rely on volunteer U.S. trainers to share their extensive knowledge with Kenyan participants, demonstrated a cultural value that emphasized knowledge sharing as a new form of power, status, and job security. Over the course of more than a decade in Kenya, AFM’s training model encouraged and demonstrated benefits of firefighting and emergency service workers sharing new knowledge with their teammates and community members. These training curriculums encouraged Kenyan participants to “pay it forward” by emphasizing mentorship and train-the-trainer programming. For example, one Kenyan study participant named Joel* described how he worked to share knowledge with other fire service members across Kenya but also made a “handshake deal” with these trainees to pass on what they learned to others. This handshake deal ultimately encouraged knowledge spread across Kenya’s fire and emergency service communities. Joel’s persistence in this approach is attributed to knowledge spreading across the Kenya fire and emergency services, as evidenced by several study participants specifically noting Joel’s individual impact on shaping their pro-knowledge sharing behavior. 

Early research findings, including those presented at the 2026 Wildland Fire Canada Conference and Canadian Smoke Forum in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan may help explain how culture is changing and evolving across the Kenya fire service in a way that ultimately shapes firefighter safety outcomes. Our initial findings indicate that Africa Fire Mission’s efforts to train specific values have shaped learning, leadership, and community service in Kenya, as well as reinforced safety practices in unexpected ways. Beyond their application in Kenya, these findings also support practical changes for HROs operating in international contexts (e.g., Africa) as well as under HROs in resourced communities (e.g., volunteer fire departments).

While these initial insights are interesting, they are only the start of creating a more vivid picture of changes across the Kenyan fire and emergency services. To date, the study includes more than 220 hours of field work, 1,300 photographs and more than 20 interviews has identified five key values that have shaped crucial changes in the Kenyan fire and emergency services. Ongoing analysis, combined with a 2026 University of Kentucky College of Communication and Information CURATE grant is supporting additional interviews and site visits, including research at the upcoming 2026 EMS and Fire Symposium scheduled to take place in Nairobi, Kenya this November.

Ultimately, a final report will go to the Africa Fire Mission and the study will be published in an academic, practitioner-focused journal.

Dr Amber Lynn Scott and Dr Ikeola Bodunde, are from the Department of Communication, College of Communication and Information, at the University of Kentucky.

The country’s worsening air quality emergency killed 5,310 in September alone; 3,560 were attributed directly to emissions from a surge in forest and land fires over the past months, the center’s analysis found. The data were estimated using research on mortality rates and air pollution, broken down by region.

“The number of citizens exposed to “unhealthy” to “hazardous” air quality hit a monthly record peak of 58 million in September — a 40% jump from August’s peak,” representatives said in the analysis. “Citizens inhaling hazardous-level air in Kalimantan alone nearly tripled from 2.8 million to 6.4 million during the worst days of the month.”

Forest and land fires (karhutla) burning throughout the country surpassed records previously set during 2015, when numerous states of emergency were declared due to “Southeast Asian haze” caused by slash-and-burn practices in Indonesia. Despite that, the country’s National Disaster Management Agency has been constrained due to a 75% budget cut this year, according to the researchers.

Wildfires burning in Indonesia’s peatlands, forests, and agricultural land since July caused the country to produce the world’s highest levels of emissions in September. The European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service says the smoke is also deteriorating air quality in countries much further away, including southern Sumatra, southern Kalimantan, southern Papua New Guinea, the Indian Ocean, mainland South-East Asia, the western Pacific and as far as north-west Australia.

“The government is facing heavy criticism for prioritising political and economic interests that benefit from a laissez-faire approach to land use, logging, and plantation expansion over public health and safety,” the Centre said in a press release. “On 20 October, the two-year mark of Prabowo-Gibran administration, student protestors took to the streets to demand that the government declare karhutla a national disaster and stop leaving underfunded provinces to handle the crisis alone.”

View the interactive map.

The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air is registered as a nonprofit in Finland, with staff across Asia and Europe.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Indonesia’s wildfires impact air quality for much of region

US-UK collaboration produces UK Community Wildfire Resilience Framework

The UK’s 2026 wildfire season brought unprecedented attention to the growing challenge of wildfire risk and resilience. Record-breaking summer temperatures and extended periods of hot, dry weather contributed to a high number of wildfires recorded in England. By the end of August, fire and rescue services had responded to more than 1,354 wildfires, placing significant strain on emergency response resources, second only to the 1,592 fires in 2022.

The severity of the season prompted the UK Government’s largest use of the emergency mobile phone alert system to warn the public of very high wildfire risk and discourage activities that could ignite fires, including barbeques, campfires, and fireworks. Wildfire is no longer an isolated or infrequent hazard in the UK, but an increasingly significant national resilience challenge requiring coordinated and proactive action to reduce wildfire risk and protect communities.

Growing up in southeast England, flooding was a familiar hazard, but wildfire was not. That changed when, at 25, I encountered wildfire for the first time while hiking the Appalachian Trail in the United States.

This experience led me to relocate to Idaho and pursue a PhD focused on community wildfire resilience and human-wildfire interactions across the western US. Through the International Association of Wildland Fire and the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, I met Victoria Amato in 2022, a community wildfire planning specialist working with SWCA Environmental Consultants. Excited to meet a fellow Brit working in the US wildfire community, we began discussing how decades of wildfire preparedness and resilience efforts in North America could help communities in the UK prepare for a future of increasing wildfire risk.

Following the 2022 UK Wildfire Conference in Belfast, a group of individuals representing wildfire mitigation and management entities from the UK and US formed a knowledge-sharing partnership focused on community resilience and property protection, spearheaded by Amato. The collaboration resulted in the 2024 UK Community Wildfire Resilience Framework for Property Protection.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: UK unprepared for increasingly frequent wildfires, framework warns

Drawing on successful programs, best practices, and lessons learned from North America and other regions, the paper outlines practical actions and opportunities that can help UK decision-makers build and strengthen community resilience and reduce wildfire risk to life and property.

The framework comes at a critical time. As higher temperatures, prolonged drought, and changing climate conditions contribute to weather conditions more conducive to wildfire activity, the UK is likely to experience more frequent and damaging wildfire events. Despite this growing risk, wildfire management remains devolved. In England, there is no single agency responsible for wildfire or active national wildfire preparedness program, leaving no clear governance structure for coordinated risk reduction and mitigation efforts.

With public awareness and concern increasing following the 2026 wildfire season, there is growing momentum for a more coordinated approach to wildfire preparedness, mitigation, and community engagement. The framework draws on proven approaches from other nations, identifying successful programs and strategies that could be adapted and scaled for the UK, including Community Wildfire Protection Plans, Fire Safe Councils, and WUI building codes. It also highlights opportunities to expand and strengthen existing initiatives such as Firewise UK through a more coordinated national approach. This framework could be used as a road map in response to the UK Parliament’s wildfire management.

By promoting collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and the adaption of proven international models, the framework provides a practical roadmap for building long-term wildfire resilience in the UK. The framework aligns directly with and could help implement the recommendations of the recently published UK Parliament in its wildfire management report by establishing partnerships, governance structures, and shared learning needed to treat wildfire as a national resilience challenge. Through coordinated action across governments, industry, academia, emergency services, and land managers, the framework demonstrates how collective effort can accelerate process, strengthen preparedness, and better protect communities, property, and landscapes from wildfire risk.

First presented at the 2024 UK Wildfire Conference in Aberdeen, this framework will be featured again at Wildfire2026: UK Wildfire Conference in Leeds on 10-11^th November, where it exemplifies the theme “New Perspectives – Shared Solutions” by showcasing how international collaboration and shared expertise can come together to support a more resilient future for UK communities.

Click here to read the full framework.

Dr Meg Dolman is a Wildfire Mitigation Specialist with Idaho Power Company, Boise Idaho, and a Director on the Board of the International Association of Wildland Fire

Speakers at Wildfire 2026 – UK Wildfire Conference

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: UK unveils future wildfire plan: military aircraft, specialist fire teams and landscape transformation

With increasing frequency and severity, we are seeing large-scale wildfires and cascading consequences across the globe. In the 2026 summer fire season in Europe, major conflagrations occurred in Mediterranean and southern regions with lives and properties lost across Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Belgium, and Turkey. Albania, Germany and other countries have been affected, and the potential remains for more widespread conflagrations. Further north, Ireland and the United Kingdom had wildfires of a scale and complexity well beyond the historic norm.

These wildfires were preceded by periods of rainfall and growth in vegetation in some areas while prolonged drought occurred in others, followed by significant and widespread heatwaves disrupting European economies and lifestyles and baking landscapes and vegetation.

This From the IAWF President column is first published in Wildfire Magazine – read the full edition.

Across the Atlantic, Canada again experienced extensive wildfires in several provinces, impacting populated areas, remote and Indigenous communities, and vulnerable boreal forests. Over the border, the United States experienced a similar situation of escalating wildfire commitments and impacts, with many parts of the country in a state of high risk even if ignitions have not occurred. As with Europe, properties and lives have been lost including fire crews and aviators. Indonesia, along with other parts of Asia, is dealing with major wildfire threats and impacts. Across all fire affected countries and continents, smoke accumulations and greenhouse gas emissions are disrupting more distant places as well as atmospheric dynamics. This situation is unsustainable.

Formal instruments for cross-border and international assistance have been activated, including mutual response and coordination agreements within the European Union, and longstanding resource sharing arrangements among Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada for firefighters and incident management teams. Such agreements require many issues to be addressed including training, experience and qualifications, fitness standards, deployment conditions, fatigue and safety management, national polices and cost recovery. Even for well-established relationships – e.g. between Australia and the United States – cross-walking processes to align roles, skills, competencies and training continue to be reviewed and refined each year so the expectations of resource providers and recipients are met when firefighters and incident management personnel are deployed.

The United Nations Global Fire Management Hub (UN Fire Hub), formed under the Food and Agriculture Organisation headquartered in Rome, established an Interoperability Working Group in 2025 that is tackling many current and emerging issues and making good progress. However, these challenges will be with us for a very long time and at different scales in different places. While some countries have relatively mature wildfire response and management arrangements, others are yet to develop, especially where large wildfires are a relatively recent phenomenon and fire services are localised rather than national.

Many of the interoperability issues go well beyond high-level agreements, intelligence and data sharing, and the like. Metropolitan fire services are generally organised, trained and equipped for structural fires, while forestry and park services have different cultures, equipment and skillsets for dealing with fires in vegetation. In some countries the military is involved, while the aerial firefighting sector also involves many corporations and private-public partnerships. The ability for different agencies and organisations to work together in planning and preparedness, and to establish command and control, develop operational strategies and tactics, deploy resources including aircraft for effectiveness and efficiency, and ensure the safety and wellbeing of their personnel, can be a significant challenge. This coordination requires mutual respect, communication at all levels, a common operating picture, training and exercising together, the ability to recognize and use specialist skills regardless of service or rank, and often long-term cultural change within each organisation.

Fundamentally, wildfires occur in vegetation. The point of origin may be remote and in difficult terrain. Directly applying water to burning materials from hoses and trucks, as in metropolitan contexts with reticulated water supplies and hydrants, will only ever be practical at small scales, in accessible areas, and for the protection of built assets. Hose lays and sprinkler systems can be effective for protecting landscape features of significant value, especially in difficult terrain where water sources such as collar tanks (or flexitanks) can be inserted by helicopter, and water remains useful for mopping up smouldering materials. Aerial firefighting, whether dropping water and suppressants on the fire edge, or retardants on unburnt vegetation, will always be limited by scale, cost, aircraft availability and proximity to refilling points. Even dry fire fighting, involving managing fuels using hand tools and earthmoving machinery to cut mineral breaks, separate areas of flammable vegetation, and create access for vehicles, has many constraints. While rapid fire detection and multi-agency emergency response are essential, as well as international and continental mutual-aid agreements, there will never be enough firefighters, water, trucks, aircraft and earthmoving equipment. Modern building standards and materials are also essential but do very little for historic towns, older suburbs, remote communities and disadvantaged populations.

As global fire regimes change and conflagrations have bigger impacts, the lessons to be learned and the strategies needed are old, not new. The use of fire for strategic and tactical backburns, and to burn out fuels between constructed or natural breaks and the wildfire edge, remains a powerful tool for fire fighting in the right hands, but can be a significant risk without expert judgment and skills. Beyond fire fighting, the use of fire in the landscape for prescribed burning is essential for managing vegetation and fuels at a range of scales, as well as for learning and development so that firefighters and managers acquire a practical understanding of fire behaviour. After successive unsustainable wildfire seasons in Canada, there is now a national prescribed fire training program that is expanding its focus and program delivery nationwide. The UN Fire Hub is also actively promoting Integrated Fire Management so that all aspects of living with and managing fire in the landscape are given prominence, including prescribed burning and land management. To protect life, property and the environment from wildfires, we need to better manage the environment before wildfires start.

Trevor Howard is the President of the IAWF and national manager, prescribed burning strategy, with the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council (AFAC).

The 600 delegates in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan for the conference last week voted for a first and second place in three divisions – Cultural Fire, Wildland Fire and Prescribed Fire.

Cultural Fire

The Carriere family from northern Saskatchewan took out both first and second prize for their photos in their We Are Fire program.

Michela’s photo of a cultural burn on the Saskatchewan River Delta was taken on her DJI Air3s drone. Her caption read: “Beautiful image captured as the sun was setting, the conditions were perfect for the burn. Part of the We Are Fire movement and Muskrats to Moose collective.”

Renee Carriere’s photo was titled Where Fire Meets Water. “An Elder Fire Land Guardian moves through the frozen channels of the Saskatchewan River Delta as fire travels through the golden marsh grasses. From above, the contrast between flame, ice, and the vast northern landscape reveals both the power of fire and the beauty of this living ecosystem. Cultural burning is more than the act of lighting a fire — it is a relationship with the land, guided by knowledge, observation, and respect. In this moment, fire and water meet in a landscape shaped by generations of connection to the land.”

Wildland Fire

Sarah Pratchler from Gel Systems Canada won the category with the capture of the spectacular colours during the application of her organisation’s FG-2 Ready-To-Use Gel on a house at Molanosa (Montreal Lake Cree Nation) during the 2025 DITCH fire.

Runner up Natalie Krizan from the University of Lethbridge caught the regrowth after the severe Jasper wildfires of 2024. “Regrowth begins again a mere few months after, as bright purple fireweed contrasts against the charred landscape.”

Prescribed Fire

Natalie Krizan, University of Lethbridge, won this category with an intriguing image taken during a prescribed fire within the Whitehorse South fuel break. “The heat of the burn blurs the figure of a firefighter as he uses a drip torch to ignite the next row of protective flame.”

Sheldon Brewer’s photo was a riot of red as a firefighter worked on a firebreak around a community.