From their home on the shores of Puntzi Lake, Les and Cathy Friend have dedicated their lives to keeping British Columbians safe from wildfires.

The couple works at the Puntzi tanker base. He loads water bombers. She cooks meals for the base’s firefighting staff.

Today, their lakeside home has been reduced to a pile of charred wreckage -- one of the growing number of casualties of the province’s severe wildfire season.

“That’s the irony of this,” said Rob Jaberg, who worked with the couple for several years. “It’s incomprehensible what happened, given that they spent their lives and their livelihood protecting the rest of us.”

Roughly 150 kilometres west of Williams Lake, the fire that took the Friend family’s home exploded on Saturday, destroying the Caribou Woodland Resort and several nearby houses.

“A few of them belonged to people involved with our operations, so of course that hits close to home,” said Kevin Skrepnek, chief fire information officer for the B.C. Wildfire Service.

There are more than 200 wildfires currently burning around the province -- 206, according to the latest estimates, eight of which were discovered on Monday.

Though this weekend’s cooler weather and rain helped reduce the fire danger around B.C., the number of fires still burning has necessitated bringing in help from as far away as Australia.

Some 50 firefighters from Australia arrived in the province today, joining the more than 100 out-of-province personnel currently helping to battle the fires.

So far this year, more than 283,430 hectares have been burned in wildfires -- an area nearly the size of Metro Vancouver. Les and Cathy Friend’s home is just one small piece of that total.

The couple is now living -- and still working -- at the Puntzi tanker base, and their firefighting friends have set up an online fundraising page to help them rebuild.

With files from CTV Vancouver’s Shannon Paterson