Three firefighting airplane crew members were killed Thursday when the C-130 Hercules aerial water tanker they were in crashed while battling wildfires in southeastern Australia, officials said.
They were part of a crew on a California-based tanker, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said. He did not identify the crew members but called them heroes.
New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the plane crashed in the state's Snowy Monaro region, which came as Australia grapples with an unprecedented fire season that has left a large swath of destruction.
Canada-based Coulson Aviation said in a statement that one of its Lockheed large air tankers was lost after it left Richmond in New South Wales with retardant for a firebombing mission. It said the accident was "extensive" but had few other details.
"The only thing I have from the field reports are that the plane came down, it's crashed and there was a large fireball associated with that crash," said Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons.
Foreign Minister Marise Payne said she had conveyed Australia's condolences to U.S. Ambassador Arthur Culvahouse Jr.
"Our hearts go out to their loved ones. They were helping Australia, far from their own homes, an embodiment of the deep friendship between our two countries," she said in a statement.
The tragedy brings the death toll from the blazes to at least 31 since September. The fires have also destroyed more than 2,600 homes and razed more than 25.7 million acres — an area bigger than Indiana.
Coulson grounded other firefighting aircraft as a precaution pending investigation, reducing planes available to firefighters in New South Wales and neighboring Victoria state. The four-propeller Hercules drops more than 4,000 gallons of fire retardant in a single pass.
Spokeswoman Robyn Baldwin of Coulson, with headquarters in the Canadian province of British Columbia and extensive U.S. operations, declined to identify the crew members or say where they were from.
"We ask for privacy at this time as we mourn the loss of our crew members," Baldwin said.
Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the national air crash investigator and state police will investigate the crash site, which firefighters described as an active fire ground.
"There is no indication at this stage of what's caused the accident," Fitzsimmons said.
Berejiklian said more than 1,700 volunteers and personnel were in the field, and five fires were being described at an "emergency warning" level — the most dangerous on a three-tier scale — across the state and on the fringes of the national capital, Canberra.
Associated Press writer Gillian Flaccus in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this report.
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