He was part of a 102-strong deployment of Australian wildfire experts who worked alongside firefighters from Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States.

Mr Sharp’s roles were as divisional supervisor and fireground controller, given a section on the fire and managing the resources allocated to contain it.

His deployment lasted about four and a half weeks with a shift pattern of 14 days on and two days off.

Mr Sharp said, “it was a wonderful opportunity to exchange some experience and knowledge”.

“It was a really good experience and a tremendous opportunity to see how the Canadian firefighters managed their big forest fires,” he said.

“It wasn’t so much a case of going over there to try and tell them how to do it, it was more a case of going over and working within their structure and systems.

“One of the reasons they like Australians is that we both use the same management structure for handling wildfires and major incidents and they know we can slot straight into those roles.”

He added that the Canadians were also impressed by how well the firefighters from different states of Australia worked well together as the different provinces there often use different strategies.

Mr Sharp said while a lot was interchangeable the Canadian landscape meant the details were different. 

“The principles of fighting fire in Canada and Australia are basically the same – you need to construct control lines and breaks, we use water, and backburn – but the specific techniques are very different and that’s because of their landscape,” he said.

“They have big pine forests and very steep hills.

“They also have an absolute wealth of lakes across the landscape, so in many cases there’s a water supply quite close to the fires, they will pump water from those lakes for kilometres.

“On one fire I worked on they had over 200 lengths of hose – which is nearly 6km – most firefighters in Australia would have experienced maybe half-a-dozen or ten lengths of hose because we don’t have the same water supply.

“They also do a lot of work clearing fire breaks by hand because it’s way too steep to be operating machinery safely.

“At the briefings wildlife would be mentioned because bears roam freely through the forested areas, along with other predators such as cougars and lynx.

“As well as moose because the bulls can be quite aggressive and the cows can be quite defensive of the calves.

“It was a bit funny that the Aussies wanted to see the bears.”

In the past 15 years there’s been 12 deployments to Canada and USA with their firefighters deployed to Australia in that time as well.

Mr Sharp said it was hard work but valuable.

“You really needed the rest days having worked 14 days in the lead up and they were mostly 12-hour shifts,” he said.

“But it was a great learning opportunity and to build a little bit of a network.

“The information exchange is invaluable and to develop that is just great, it was a unique experience.”