Operation PEREGRINE was a domestic Canadian military operation that took place between August 3 and September 16, 2003.
In early August 2003, British Columbia was overwhelmed by over 800 separate forest fires. Provincial fire services were stretched to the breaking point, and tens of thousands of people were forced to evacuate their homes. The provincial government requested federal aid, and within days, over 2,200 Canadian Forces (CF) personnel had been mobilized. After receiving a day of basic forest firefighting training from the British Columbia Forest Service, including safety procedures, fire ratings, hose handling, and fire behaviour, the soldiers took to the fire lines. Deployed soldiers were divided in two task forces - Task Force One based in Kamloops, and Task Force Two, based in the Okanagan Valley.
The operation lasted 45 days, and at its height more than 2,600 military personnel were in action. In terms of deployed forces at the time, it surpassed in numbers any Canadian Forces operation overseas.
It was the CF's third-largest recent domestic operation, after Operation RECUPERATION in response to the 1998 ice storm in Southern Ontario and Quebec, and Operation ASSISTANCE in response to the 1997 Red River flood.
Read more about Operation Peregrine: Deployed Canadian Forces Units, Decorations
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)