NY firefighters return home after unexpected delays

ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS10) -- More than 20 New York firefighters safely returned home Thursday night after battling both fires and some unexpected delays for the past two weeks. The crews were sent out west to combat the growing wildfires.

"As soon as we stepped off the shuttle, we realized our flight was canceled," said Logan Quinn, a forest ranger from North Hudson, Essex County.

That flight should have brought the 21-person crew to states like Montana and Oregon. Instead, a global technology outage interrupted those plans. The firefighters then traveled to New Hampshire to get a truck that would take them on a cross-country road trip.

“From Rochester, we went to St. Paul, Minnesota, and then St. Paul, Minnesota to Helena. Those were 16 hour driving days," said Quinn.

20 of the firefighters were sent to Montana and one forest ranger was sent to Oregon. Once they arrived, the crews said they witnessed fires they'd never seen before.

"There wasn't much hope of attacking it directly," Quinn said. "2,700 acres, 2,000 acres -- those are, you know, very extremely large in New York, but they’re just a blip on the radar in the grand scheme of things when you talk about the Rocky Mountain fires."

The Grouse fire in Montana has swept 3,000 acres on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest since it started at the end of July. According to the crews, this type of damage requires much more than just buckets of water.

"It’s tough, I mean, you got to carry gas, oil., wedges, extra chains, tools, a gallon of water, headlamps, batteries, 60-70 pounds, and sometimes we have to wear it all 16 hours of the day," said James Canevari, Lands and Forests, Hermon, St. Lawrence County.

The all-day mission is one that some firefighters said is also better preparing them back in New York.

"The experience that we bring back just makes us better firefighters here in New York, and better prepared for anything that can potentially happen here," said Steve Jackson, a forest ranger from Johnsonville, Rensselaer County.

The Department of Environmental Conservation said they expect to deploy more firefighters out west as the wildfires continue to spread.