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Culture

A 'sister city' in Mexico has sent volunteer firefighters to help with Oregon blazes

Alejandro Navarro/Twitter

The entire west coast of the United States is either on fire or covered in some measure of smoke and ash at the moment. We've seen photos of the midday sky the wrong color, from eery orange to apocalypse red. Entire towns have burned down, air quality indexes are hovering in the hazardous zone for millions, and our skilled, brave firefighters are overwhelmed.

Right now, the west needs all the help it can get.

Enter the volunteer firefighters of Guanajuato, Mexico who have arrived in Southern Oregon to help try to get the raging blazes under control. Known as the Heroic Fire Department of Guanajuato, the firefighters come from a city in central Mexico that has a 50-year "sister city" relationship with the Oregon city of Ashland. According to Portland Monthly, the five firefighters dispatched to Oregon have trained in the area before, which means they can jump right in.


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Heroes

Firefighters are killed every year by wildfires. These scientists want to change that.

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In November 2016, huge forest fires swept through eight southern states in the U.S.

They burned more than 119,000 acres and shrouded regions from Alabama up to West Virginia in smoke. Parks shut down, residents evacuated, and more than 6,300 firefighters were deployed to the area to try to contain these raging fires.

As devastating as these fires were, wildfires are actually pretty common. On average,the United States seesmore than 100,000 wildfires every year — in fact, the U.S. Wildfire Tracker shows 45 large fires burning in the United States at the time of this writing.

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