This ranks as the second-highest total for any year and comes amid a heatwave that has killed more than 2000 people in Spain and Portugal alone.
"Sometimes it's hard to breathe," says New Zealand Herald planning director Vera Alves, who recently returned to the outskirts of Lisbon to visit her family.
"The sky often looks cloudy, but it's not cloud, it's smoke. And the air feels really, really dry … The other day it was 42 degrees and it's not even something I want to brag about to people in winter, because it's just unbearable."
"There are restrictions on some of the activities people can do to prevent fires from spreading. They've also recruited many more firefighters, but honestly, things do not feel under control. The magnitude of it is just so vast."
Firefighters using hose to fight a wildfire near Landiras, southwestern France. Photo / Fire Brigade of the Gironde region / via AP
Alves says the mistake Portugal made was not doing enough in the lead-up to this event, after a 2017 wildfire that killed 66 people.
The events unfolding in the northern hemisphere pose serious questions about New Zealand's level of preparedness for the likelihood of wildfires in the warmer months.
This chaos in Europe comes at a time when many of the nation's fire trucks bear messaging claiming that firefighters are "underpaid and undervalued".
New Zealand firefighters are calling for better working conditions. Photo / Bevan Conley
Joe Stanley, the vice president of the New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union (NZPFU), tells the Front Page that he is "tremendously concerned" about what the warmer, drier months hold for New Zealand.
"The wildfires in the northern hemisphere are really indicative of the significant change we are seeing in our climate through the current crisis," Stanley says.
Those changes, he says, have led to wetter winters and drier summers, putting New Zealand at greater risk of extreme events.
While New Zealand was spared an uptick in wildfires last summer due to wetter conditions, Stanley warns that we can't rely on this happening every year.
"We were very lucky last summer. Although the temperatures were very high, we didn't get drought conditions because of the distribution of clouds in the southern hemisphere. We may not be able to rely on that next year or the year thereafter."
The threat of wildfires is not something to be scoffed at. The Port Hills and Nelson wildfires in the last decade have offered a glimpse at how severe these catastrophes could be for New Zealand.
"We have almost 15,000 operational personnel across the country made up of career and volunteer firefighters. For those two fires, I would say that we probably mobilised 75 per cent of our entire operational force, which is a significant amount of people working on a large-scale campaign lasting weeks. The manpower involved is absolutely tremendous."
The problem at the moment is that Aoteaora's firefighters already feel overworked under non-catastrophic conditions.
"Career firefighters across the country are significantly short-staffed. There are firefighters in Auckland working more than 100 hours a week to ensure that we can retain a level of response and that fire trucks can roll out the door to our communities' emergencies," says Stanley.
"Where I am in Christchurch, we have a number of firefighters doing probably between 80 to 90 hours a week."
Stanley says he doesn't believe that firefighters have been resourced sufficiently to respond to emergencies at the level they should be.
"As someone who works on a fire truck every day, I am disappointed that more money isn't spent on responding to communities in need. The lack of heavy aerials, the terrible state of our ageing and decrepit pumping fleet is just an example of how the money isn't being spent in the right places."
These issues leave Stanley deeply concerned about the fire service's ability to respond to the threat of wildfires in the coming years.
"It depends on the size of the wildfires, but I'm really concerned that we won't have the staffing and resourcing across the organisation to deal with any significant wildfires," he says.
"We are using dilapidated, old equipment. We struggle to keep firefighters at work because of the number of hours they're working. We are battling with volunteers and their responsibilities to their own employers."
Response from Fire and Emergency NZ
Fire and Emergency NZ deputy national commander Brendan Nally told the Herald that changing climate conditions did pose a greater risk but that his organisation is well prepared and resourced to fight wildfires.
"A warmer, hotter and dryer climate is likely to cause more days of high or extreme fire danger, longer fire seasons and more extreme weather including higher wind speeds and lower relative humidity – all of which contribute to the heightened fire danger," Nally said.
He explained that these factors alone don't necessarily lead to more wildfires.
"Most wildfires in New Zealand are caused by human activity," he said.
"Everyone can do their bit to reduce the risk of a wildfire starting and protect what they value. This can be removing vegetation from around homes, planting less flammable plants and checking the weather conditions and fire danger before lighting a fire or doing any activity that could cause a spark."
Local residents watch a forest fire move up a slope towards the village of Casal da Quinta, outside Leiria, central Portugal. Photo / AP
Nally said Fire and Emergency's newly established community risk management teams work with communities and landowners to help mitigate the risk of wildfires.
He also said that they are using more technology to monitor the climate to identify areas at greatest risk.
"We use specialised technology including gathering weather information from both fixed and portable weather stations, which allow us to monitor temperature, wind speed and direction, rainfall and relative humidity – all factors that play a big part in the intensity and speed of the fire," he said.
"This weather information provides valuable fire prediction and modelling at an incident, such as at the Waiharara fire earlier this year, to inform how the fire is likely to behave at any time."
Nally says that the organisation is working to ensure it has a full range of skills to reduce the risk of wildfires. This, he says, includes the creation of a national wildfire specialist team.
Whether these measures are enough to stop New Zealand from suffering the same fate as both Australia and Europe will be determined in the coming years.
UPDATE: The Fire and Emergency NZ communications team sent through an updated comment after the initial publication of this story.
The communications team noted that it would be an extremely rare occurrence that a heavy or high ladder aerial would be used to suppress a wildfire.
The communications team added: "Since Fire and Emergency was formed in July 2017, 88 new fire appliances designed for rural firefighting (54 fire trucks and 34 water tankers) have been delivered to brigades across the country. These would be the fire trucks predominantly fighting wildfires."
• The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am.
