In mid-January I was sent on a military company assignment to recon the Los Angeles fires and use the experience to teach our leadership staff about wildfire. I was in Australia and was flown to California. As I packed, I turned on the TV and saw footage – big flames, heroes, victims and their stories, political blame slinging, shouts of incompetence, and lots of videos of fire aviation operations.
I arrived in Southern California and linked up with my small team of corporate leaders. I was their wildfire expert and the next day, after the red flag weather forecasts for Santa Ana winds lifted, we headed down the coast to visit the tragic wake of the Pacific Palisades fire.
Having spent a career around the US Forest Service wildfire operations, the footprint of wildfire response was familiar: inbound structural city firefighting engines in short convoys; task forces; tents; trucks; trailers; staged fire equipment; and crews waiting at an oceanside incident command post. There were no federal fire response rigs, just CAL FIRE local fire response vehicles, and many law enforcement patrolling to deter arsonists and looters.
The Pacific Coast Highway between the coastline and where the rolling hills – with their brush and dried grass – climb upward among homes. Photo Michael Scott-Hill
PERSPECTIVE FROM YEARS OF BURNING
Days later, flying back to Australia, I processed all I had experienced.
I’ve worked on countless wildfires with the US Forest Service, yet these LA fires were unique. No matter how each began, did the fires have to be as bad as they turned out to be?
Thirty-two years ago, I had been a wildland firefighter stationed in Southern California and earned my place on the Los Padres Hotshots. In 1993 we successfully fought several wildfires sometimes driven by Santa Ana winds.
I learned that the fire regime in California is ancient in its cyclic patterns. I was taught about weather patterns and fire fuels; we specialized in working the big fires along the urban fringe. Southern California is one of the world’s most wildfire prone areas, and its wildfire flames have the potential to mix with its people – and often do.
In Southern California many people craft comfortable lives, using technology to distance themselves from the realities of the natural world: air conditioners and beautiful shady yards insulate the people from the natural hot, often harsh, landscape.
What has changed in the Southern California wildfires since I was a young hotshot?
The tactics employed in fighting wildfires have shifted – at least in California – to promote situations for large fire growth using indirect attack strategies. Weather patterns worldwide have shifted, causing fire seasons to be altered in locations; and of course, there are financial realities that make wildland fire fighting no longer as attractive a profession as it once was.
There are factors in Southern California that won’t change. The hot sun will shine. The grass and brush will grow, and this vegetation will cure and die in its normal life cycles. The Santa Ana winds will always blow in strong from Nevada and race over the hills. Wildfires will always start naturally, by accident, or arson.
Piles of yard vegetation to be chipped had been cut by contracted crews awaited mobile chippers. The hazard-reduction operation continued into areas untouched by fire, to reduce future fuels. Photo Michael Scott-Hill
Which of these factors can be modified by humans? Fuels that fires consume can be managed to reduce accumulation (loading) that builds up over time. Wildfires need fuel to take hold and grow, just as they need ignition sources. The wildfire fuels typical of Southern California, such as dried grass, brush and timber, all have predictable cyclic points in their life cycles when they are ready, able to carry, and to be consumed by fire.
In Southern California when I was working there, urban interface zones and Santa Ana winds were always factors; they were dangerous, so we learned about them and used that knowledge to prepare for all that could happen. Could the LA Emergency Response Management apparatus have been better prepared? LA has seen urban development expand its boundaries more than its density; the interface is so much larger than it was when fire careers began. And the 30-year fire return interval in chaparral is longer than many careers. How do agencies prepare?
There are many valuable lessons in disaster management, and pre-disaster preparedness that can be pulled from the LA fires, if we take the time and effort to look carefully enough beneath the layers of smoke that might be blocking our vision.
Funding for a fire mapping service across the top half of Australia is due to end on 30 June, with this week’s Federal election highlighting the uncertainty around continuation of funds beyond that date.
The Northern Australia Fire Information Service (NAFI) provides satellite derived fire mapping data for fire managers and the agricultural sector across the North – in Western Australia, Northern Territory, South Australia and Queensland. The main fire season in the North of Australia typically begins around now and lasts into August or September.
The Australian Government has funded NAFI in recent years through its National Emergency Management Agency but has not committed to continued support. It’s May Federal Budget was silent on its future.
Australia goes to the polls in a Federal Election this Saturday (3 May). The Federal Opposition has pledged $2.5 million over three years if it is elected to govern, which would allow the service to continue.
The site was created by a community of fire researchers and managers in 2002 and is managed by Charles Darwin University. NAFI tracks current fires and publishes them on a map of Australia using a visual representation of ‘hotspots’. Hotspots are produced from thermal sensors on a number of different satellites including NOAA and NASA.
NAFI also produces burnt-area maps that are updated throughout the year. NAFI is the only service that provides critical fire information over the 80% (remote/regional) of Australia where 99.3% of fires occur.
The NAFI website is free for users to access and has relied on sporadic, often short-term, grant funding to survive. In addition to researchers and fire agencies, the site is an essential tool for a wide range of other land holders impacted by wildfire including pastoralists, mining, forestry, defence and other assorted carbon abatement projects.
On January 8 this year a film crew was on the ground in the LA firestorm capturing footage that is, in the aftermath of the tragedy, helping to explain the fire behavior and sheer destruction of the event.
Their work is now ready for viewing as an hour documentary on PBS. The program has interviews with fire officials who were there on the day, scientists, residents, and a volunteer fire brigade, who discuss the challenges of urban firestorms and the need to better protect communities.
Weathered- Inside the LA Firestorm is out of filmmaker Trip Jennings and Balance Media, who produced Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire two years ago.
Camera operator, Josh Finbow films the aftermath of the Eaton Fire from a fire helicopter, Altadena, CA. Photo: Connor Nelson
Watch the television premiere of Weathered- Inside the LA Firestorm on Wednesday, March 19 and online thereafter:
Television broadcast PBS Member Stations – 10PM Pacific and Eastern/9PM Central, online at that link from 5.30pm Pacific.
PBS Terra YouTube – Join director Trip Jennings, PBS host Maiya May and crew for a live chat at 5:30 PM Pacific Time
PBS host Maiya May surveys the destruction of a home in the Eaton Fire, Altadena, CA. Photo: Josh Finbow
Produced as a special edition of PBS Weathered, host Maiya May explains a play-by-play of the fires with first-person footage, cinematic fire footage, and animations created in collaboration with NASA.
The show will be available after the premiere at the link above so please share with anyone you believe would be interested in this program.
But please note – for those outside of the United States access to PBS may be denied, but the YouTube links should work everywhere.
Connor Nelson, while filming the Palisades Fire. Photo: Josh Finbow
The Pedrógão Grande mega fire of June 2017 shaped a region by tragedy, causing profound human consequences that have left people battling their own memories, questioning their safety and working through trauma.
Lily Mayers writes on how the lives of those touched by Portugal’s worst mega fire have changed since the smoke cleared.
The fire storm’s intensity melted skin off hands and feet, liquified glass windows and reduced standing signs to puddles of metal. The ferocious wind whipped heat up from the burning forests, thrusting flames forward before crashing them down on the small towns dotted across Portugal’s central region, suffocating the area in thick black smoke.
On the afternoon of Saturday, June 17, 2017, a complex of at least five wildfires ignited, spread and merged across 11 small towns surrounding the municipality of Pedrógão Grande in Central Portugal creating an unstoppable and catastrophic fire event. Sixty-four people died and 250 were injured. Over five days more than 46,000 hectares of land were destroyed. The fire struck territory carpeted by highly flammable, abandoned pine and eucalyptus plantations at a time of prolonged drought and enduring heat waves. The major triggers were found to be contact between vegetation and a 25 kV electrical line as well as lightning strikes.
Aerial view of a forest area between the villages of Pobrais and Nodeirinho, in the municipality of Pedrógão Grande, in the central region of Portugal.
Volunteer firefighter Rui Rosinha, 46, was called in as reinforcement. He was driving to one of the emerging spot fires when his team’s truck collided with a car on the N-236 highway near Pobrais, southeast of Coimbra. The crash stranded them on the side of the road and trapped the three unconscious passengers of the car. As the firefighters struggled unsuccessfully to free the passengers from the wreckage, the wind, radiation and heat from the approaching fire became unbearable. They were forced to save themselves and leave the passengers behind. Huddled together on a small island junction of raised concrete in the middle of the highway, Rui and his four colleagues then endured an hour of exposure to flames, heat, cyclonic winds and the thrashing of airborne debris.
“We experienced temperatures that seemed impossible,” Rui said “The radiation came in waves. I felt it as if it were extreme waves of heat, I remember not just once, but many times the impact and pain, as it hit my body.”
Though severely burned, the group was able to successfully shelter three adults and a child on the same junction. When help finally arrived Rui and the others were driven to medical centers before being airlifted to hospital and that’s the last thing he remembers.
“If ever there was a hell on earth, for me it was there.”
The fire moved at unbelievable ferocity, with more than 4400 hectares burned in a single hour, violently accelerated by intense wind gusts, emitting enough energy to propel itself and exceed the capacity to be extinguished within four hours of igniting. The severe speed of the fire, which by nightfall was advancing at 15 kilometers an hour, outpaced evacuation orders and knocked out communication networks, trapping hundreds and killing dozens in their cars as they fled on the N-236 highway.
It was the worst mega fire in Portugal’s history. As a result of the disaster, family members of those who died and others who were seriously injured were compensated from a 2.5-million-euro support fund. A complete reform of land management legislation was also prompted including the introduction of a new 10-meter clearing rule between roads and vegetation, the banning of new eucalyptus plantings and a shift away from purely reactive firefighting to prevention investment. The reach of the Pedrógão Grande mega fire has left physical, psychological and generational scars, altering the social fabric of the small communities forever.
How have the lives of those touched by Portugal’s worst mega fire changed since the smoke cleared?
RUI
Almost three months after the fire, Rui awoke from a coma to a new reality. He had suffered debilitating burns to his hands, back and feet, respiratory problems as well as partial paralysis to his left side due to injuries in a nerve plexus making him wheelchair dependent.
“Those first nights, when I began to realize what had happened and when I began to understand my body and what was happening to me, those first nights were horrible.” He pleaded for psychological help as he grappled with suicidal thoughts, “I saw that I didn’t have the capacity to deal with it [alone].”
Thrust into this new reality beside him was his family.
Rui’s distraught but resilient wife, Marina, 45, had anguished through the months he was in a coma with daily drives to the hospital two hours away and when he woke she became his full-time caregiver. His two young sons, Antonio and Francisco, 12 and nine at the time, were confronted by a jarring role reversal in prematurely being the able men and joint caregivers of the house. Among these harrowing realizations for Rui was that his close childhood friend and colleague with him in the fire, Gonçalo Conceição, hadn’t survived. Rui says the guilt of surviving when his friend didn’t and not being able to save the passengers of the car, are two of the most complex psychological hurdles he is working on overcoming.
“I’m managing to approach and exorcize some ghosts and it is an almost permanent mourning to face traumas and talk about certain subjects that were taboo for me or at least I couldn’t face it.” Over the years, Rui has been able to reconcile and overcome parts of the trauma in a process that he says will never end, just forever evolve.
“These are the steps I am taking, that I am achieving to feel more at peace with myself and be at peace with others too.”
Rui comes from a family of firefighters. With reduced mobility however he has been transferred away from active duties after 28 years of service and now the Castanheira de Pêra fire brigade, once a second home to his family, is a place he feels uncomfortable and alien within. Despite everything his family has been through, both his sons dream of pursuing the family tradition. For now, it’s a dream Rui and his wife are conflicted in supporting.
ANA
Some see daily reminders of the fire written on their bodies, while others face stubborn mental barriers in evolving past June 17. Ana Luisa Bernardo, 51, lost both her mother and father, Maria, 71, and Manuel, 80 in the fire. Their car crashed on the shoulder of a road as they fled the town of Sarzedas de São Pedro.
“The descriptions from people were that the sky suddenly turned dark and they couldn’t see anything. So, I believe he didn’t realize that the turn was right there on a steep slope,” said Ana. Having worked as a diagnostic and therapeutic technician in hospitals for 25 years, she says not being able to save her parents brings immense pain, “Every day I still think about the subject. I can’t dissociate.”
For two years Ana was so paralyzed by the pain of losing her parents she was unable to enter their family home. She would visit it every weekend and clean the lower patio but not cross the threshold. Even now, Ana is still gradually sorting her parent’s belongings, a journey her daughter Sátia, 16, is helping her through. “What I’m trying to do is triage only what brings back good memories, what’s bad is not worth keeping. It’s very delicate.”
From what was already a network of small towns where most people are known to one another, now exists a new subcommunity forged by their shared grief and loss after the fire. This web of survivors refer to each other as a family who speak the same language of experience. “We share the same pain, some in one way, others in another,” Ana said of one of the tragic event’s rare silver linings.
But from the community the fire created, it also took away. Many of the towns affected haven’t been able to return to the bustling places they once were. Ana says in Sarzedas de São Pedro, the change is palpable.
DEOLINDA AND ANTONIO
Deolinda Henriques Simões and Antonio Dias Gonçalves work on their property in Nodeirnho. The manual labor involves pulling weeds, clearing gutters and cutting back the forest’s understory, to reduce the chances of another fire. Photo: Paulo Nunes dos Santos for Sonda Internacional.
Retired couple Deolinda Henriques Simões, 55, and Antonio Dias Gonçalves, 80, spend their weekends in the tiny town of Nodeirnho. The day before the fire struck, the renovations of their weekend home were finished. They escaped just in time but “in the blink of an eye” their new home was destroyed before they could enjoy it.
Once it was safe to return to the smoldering town, they drove back and found the remains of their home and all their life savings destroyed beyond repair. “All the windows and doors were wooden in the old-fashioned way. I remember getting there, I only saw the walls and that’s what happened. So much so that the beams that I had placed in aluminum were all crammed together like snails,” said Deolinda.
It is estimated more than 1,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed in the fire resulting in damages of up to 200 million euros. The Portuguese government committed to providing 30 million euros for the reconstruction of first homes. But for Deolinda and Antonio their old home had been registered as dilapidated by the previous owner, unbeknown to them, so it wasn’t eligible for insurance cover or government aid. The couple were left with nothing and had to wait three years before investing again. They have now bought around the corner from their old destroyed home but their new view frames their past struggles.
“Unfortunately, we can see the skeleton of the old house, which is just the torn walls, there’s nothing left.” Antonio says their new home has the best insurance they could get.
The couple, now acutely aware of what fuels a mega fire, use their weekends to clear the land around their new home. The manual labor involves pulling weeds, clearing gutters and cutting back the forest’s understory. It’s back-breaking work for the couple who are noticing the difficulty their age brings to the task but are limited by the cost of outsourcing it.
CÉU
Their town of Nodeirnho was once described as a lively place filled with young families and weekenders. But when the June 17 fire came through it killed 11 of the town’s 50 residents. Those who remain still live among burned houses, hauntingly permanent reminders of the night their neighbors died.
Maria do Céu Silva, 52, is one of them. Céu (as she’s known) survived the fire by sheltering in the water tank beside her home with a dozen others. She is lucky to have lived, but it was at a cost. She and the others with her had to endure the sounds of their neighbors dying within earshot. “We heard screams and cars crashing, and then we realized there were a lot of people in the village who were already dead. We never thought there would be so many. It was horrible but we couldn’t do anything. We didn’t have the means to help.”
The fire and the evidence of its destruction across the town mean residents like Céu are trapped in a time capsule, unable to move forward. “I used to actually be a very fun person, and I think that since that happened, I’m not. Because we leave the house, I speak for myself and go to my work and pass by several places where victims died. It marks us every day no matter how much we go through and forget, we remember every day.”
Among the town’s victims were two children aged three and four, and several people in their 30s. Céu says much like in Sarzedas de São Pedro, they had filled the town with activity and dynamism. Now the chemistry of the tiny village has changed dramatically. Deathly quiet and still ash-stained, it feels ghostly with virtually no passing foot or car traffic. Céu says many of the remaining population are elderly and mostly stay inside their homes. In summer, when the wind picks up Céu fears fire will return to the town.
GONÇALO
Monuments dedicated to the victims of the Pedrógão Grande fire are scattered across the region. Written on all of them is the name of the only firefighter who died, Gonçalo Fernando Correia Conceição. The charismatic and well-loved firefighter was known as “Assa” or “Dr. Assa” (from the Portuguese assar, meaning to grill) due to his renowned barbequing skills and restaurant of the same name.
The 39-year-old is missed by many within the community he was so involved in, but none feel the loss more than his family. Years on from the fire, his parents strain to speak through the grief. They, and Assa’s 17-year-old son David, live with the consequences of his selfless decision to routinely run into danger to help others, “It’s the life he chose, that’s it. It was his way to help others.” said his father, Joaquim Domingos da Conceição, 69.
Maria da Conceição, 63, grips a portrait of her son, Gonçalo Fernando Correia da Conceição, the only firefighter to die during Portugal’s Pedrógão Grande mega fire of 2017. Gonçalo was severely injured after he and his team became trapped in the flames during the extinction operation. Six years after the fire, Maria remains grief stricken by the loss of her son who was well-loved by the Castanheira de Pêra community. Photo: Paulo Nunes dos Santos for Sonda Internacional.
The 39-year-old is missed by many within the community he was so involved in, but none feel the loss more than his family. Years on from the fire, his parents strain to speak through the grief. They, and Assa’s 17-year-old son David, live with the consequences of his selfless decision to routinely run into danger to help others, “It’s the life he chose, that’s it. It was his way to help others.” said his father, Joaquim Domingos da Conceição, 69.
Hotelier Joaquim and his wife, Maria da Conceição, 63, have kept their son’s house in pristine condition in the hopes their grandson, who had to move away after Assa’s death, will someday return to the town and take over his father’s restaurant. Like many families, they experienced a double desolation when the death of a loved one prompted other family members to move away.
Inside Joaquim and Maria’s lakeside hotel in Castanheira de Pêra a huge quote has been painted on the wall of the dining hall, it reads, ‘May my presence never be forgotten in my absence! Thank you friends. – Dr. Assa.’ His parents say they have no fear their son will ever be forgotten.
THE PEDROGAO GRANDE MEGA FIRE
The Pedrógão Grande mega fire shaped a region by tragedy, causing profound human consequences that have left scores of people battling their own memories, questioning their safety and working through trauma. For those, the fire is unfathomable to forget. But in the wider community others are eager to leave it in the past and focus on the future.
While these communities oscillate between the two outlooks, the vegetation surrounding them has been quietly regrowing. Now the build-up has reached levels higher than before the fire and many fear history could repeat when the region almost inevitably faces future weather extremes.
Government forestry workers are attentively cutting back trees close to roads and houses while homeowners like Deolinda and Antonio race tirelessly against the growth of the pines closing in around them. Looking at the dense forests threaded throughout his town Joaquim Conceição says the work doesn’t go far enough, “Another similar tragedy could happen tomorrow,” he said. Meanwhile, the graves of Ana Bernardo’s parents lay claustrophobically encircled by the same thick vegetation that accelerated the fire that caused their deaths.
Lily Mayers is a freelance journalist from Sydney, Australia, based in Madrid, Spain. Mayers’ career began in television and radio news for Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC. Since moving to Spain in 2020, Mayers’ work has focused on the long-form coverage of world news and current affairs.
This report was developed with the support of Journalism fund Europe.
Many of the fires in southern California remain active but there is no shortage of views on what went wrong or right, what could or couldn’t be done, who is to blame and what do we all do now?
Wildfire Today is keen to find the most important lessons to be learnt from these fires.
Terms like “unprecedented” and “unpredicted” are not helpful – especially when we have seen it before and knew it could happen again. Those term take away responsibility and action. They excuse the fact that things could have been done, by many.
Dr Marty Alexander, long time Canadian wildland fire researcher, has reminded Wildfire Today of the 1974 publication by Clive M. Countryman, “Can Southern California Wildland Conflagrations be Stopped?”.
Countryman was at the time of writing a wildland fire behavior scientist with the USDA Forest Service in southern California. His paper was a reflection of the 1970 fire season in California where 16 people died and more than 200 000 hectares of land burned, and around 700 homes lost.
His statement on The Fire Problem barely differs from today:
Climate, fuels, topography and people create fire problems
Relatively few fires become conflagrations
Conflagrations are most frequent during Santa Ana winds
Suppression of Santa Ana fires is difficult
His other conclusions include:
Fire prevention has limited value
Firefighting techniques and equipment and not adequate
His solutions then rely on a range of fuel modification measures.
For more nostalgia, watch these 1971 newsreels – on the same topic, same problem:
Having looked back to see what we already know, Wildfire Today now turns to finding a way through new wildfire challenges.
Here are some tough questions for starters:
Evacuations
To have a large fire in such a heavily populated area with so few deaths or injuries is extraordinary. This suggests the evacuation process was largely successful – people were moved out of harms way. And yet we saw those abandoned vehicles on narrow mountainous roads that funnelled people onto Palisades Drive and Sunset Boulevard , panicked residents fleeing on foot, bulldozers shunting cars off the road to gain access for fire fighting vehicles – that’s not how an orderly evacuation is meant to work, that is last-minute, panicked fleeing. There are many international examples of disorderly evacuations going horribly wrong.
Is there are better way to get thousands of people out of the way of a fast moving wildfire? If evacuations occur well before the flames arrive that would help. But how early do you do early evacuations? When is it too late to leave? Where do 100,000 people evacuate to?
Suppression
As Carpenter noted in 1971 we need to all understand that once a fire gets to this size under these conditions all attempts to simply put it out are futile. The focus is on protecting people and strategic assets. The fire fighters on the ground and in the air understand this. Does the wider community understand this?? Does this explain all the anger that “someone should have done something”, and the thinking that if it wasn’t for a few empty hydrants and grounded aircraft (due to high winds) the fire would have been suppressed?
Fuel management
Many, many others since Carpenter have said you have got to better manage the fuels if you want to have any chance of managing the fire. What does good fuel management look like in southern California and when do we know that we have done enough? Would have it made a difference for these fires when it looks more like an urban conflagration with house to house burning?
Built environment
Are we living in the wrong places? If we know that wildfires are inevitable, why do we build homes in the middle of the highest wildfire risk areas? Any other day, it is clearly a wonderful place to live. But on days like 7 January 2025, this place was hell on earth. Do we place faith in the development of “fireproof” structures, or do we just accept that homes will burn?
Recovery
Once the emergency response phase settles and the debris is cleared, what does long term recovery look like? How do we build back better without just repeating the same mistakes? How does a community put aside the blame and divisions to work together on building long term resilience, and be ready for the next, inevitable, big fire?
There have been many articulate voices in the last few days with this Los Angeles Times article one of the better ones. It draws on wildfire researcher Jack Cohen, who encourages us to abandon our thoughts that this was a wildland fire and see it more as an urban fire that leapt from house to house, and fire historian Stephen Pyne who places today’s fire within a century of fires across a whole continent:
Extreme wildfire events are becoming more frequent and intense, satellite imagery has shown.
Six of the past seven years have been among the most extreme wildfire years on record, according to research from Australia’s University of Tasmania. The frequency of extreme wildfire events has also more than doubled between 2003 and 2023.
The research “provides concrete evidence of a worrying trend,” according to lead researcher Dr. Calum Cunningham.
A worrying trend for the world’s living beings is seemingly an economic opportunity for the global firefighting aircraft market, a new report from the Business Research Company said.
File photo of an Air Tractor 802 Fire Boss operated by Conair.
The market has “grown strongly” in recent years, with an increase from $8.77 billion in 2023 to $9.57 billion in 2024. The market is expected to grow to $13.42 by 2028 at a compound annual growth rate of 8.8%.
“The growth in the forecast period can be attributed to climate change impact on wildfires, development of next-generation fire retardants, increased focus on early detection, global expansion of wildland-urban interfaces, and government preparedness investments,” the report said. “Major trends in the forecast period include enhanced remote sensing technologies, integration of drone technology, advancements in aerial firefighting technologies, the growing importance of aerial firefighting services, and global collaboration for aerial firefighting resources.”
One of the major market trends identified in the report was the rise of autonomous aerial firefighting technology, including the autonomous MK2 developed by California-based company Rain. The autonomous helicopter is reportedly designed to transport around 30 gallons of payload to a fire and can perform all standard helicopter flight phases controlled by a remote operator.
A similar helicopter from Lockheed Martin was recently demonstrated to an audience of NASA, FEMA, and wildland firefighting officials. The company claimed the aircraft could be commanded solely on a tablet from 300 miles away and extinguish fires as small as 12 inches in diameter.
Another market driver the report found is rising global urbanization. The World Bank reported around 56% of the world’s total population lives in urban areas as of 2023, and the global urban population is expected to reach 6 billion by 2045. This, coupled with the forecast surge in the number of wildfires, is expected to drive the growth of the firefighting aircraft market.
The region with the largest share of the firefighting aircraft market was reportedly Asia-Pacific, but North America is expected to be the fastest-growing region over the coming years.
