Officials have confirmed that three American firefighters are dead after their air tanker crashed while fighting bushfires in Australia. The large C-130 Hercules went down today in a rural area of New South Wales, south of the Australian capital Canberra. There were no survivors.
There's no word yet on what caused the accident – and the names of those killed are being withheld pending family notification. The aircraft was operated by Coulson Aviation, a company that also helped fight last year's devastating California fires.
"Today is a stark and horrible reminder of the dangerous conditions that our volunteers and our emergency services personnel across a number of agencies undertake on a daily basis," New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian says. "It demonstrates the dangerous work currently being undertaken and it also demonstrates the conditions that our firefighters are working under."