Last week, I helped fighting the fires in Chapada Diamantina National Park in Brazil for a day, after I had stumbled upon a squad of volunteer firefighters while hiking.

It was tough work, particularly because so many fires were in inaccessible areas. Again and again, we had to walk to a river (down a steep slope for half an hour), fill the water canisters with 20 liters per person, out them on the back and climb back up the steep hill. In the meantime, the fire had spread of course and further sources of fire popped up. A depressing job.

The water-bombing plane was thus a welcome support. It flew quite low and dropped the water exactly where it was needed.

We worked out way deeper into the tropical forest to manually extinguish the many small fires which couldn’t be seen from the plane.