Seven people were killed when a helicopter crashed in Argentina’s western San Juan province on Wednesday morning while conducting a training exercise ahead of a wildfire response mission. The aircraft went down in Ischigualasto Natural Park after it was preparing to assist efforts against fires that had been burning for several days in a neighboring province.

Contact between the helicopter and the control room was lost at about 10:30 a.m. local time. San Juan Governor Marcelo Orrego said in a post on X that seven people had died in the provincial helicopter accident. He said the victims included firefighters, police officers and Civil Protection Department personnel.

Emergency services said the cause of the crash was under investigation and rescue teams had been deployed to the site. The San Juan provincial government declared three days of mourning. Since the start of the week, multiple wildfires have spread through mountainous areas of La Rioja, where local firefighters reported that hundreds of hectares of forest had burned in only three days.