[imagesource: Reuters / Mike Hutchings]

As winds pummelled Cape Town’s City Bowl on Saturday, a fire first seen above Deer Park quickly spread, leading to some residents in Oranjezicht evacuating their homes.

Thankfully, after tireless work from the City’s Fire and Rescue services, along with Volunteer Wildfire Services (VWS), the fire was contained by the early hours of Sunday morning.

Firefighters remained on the scene throughout the morning to ensure that there were no further outbreaks from some still smouldering areas.

According to the Daily Maverick, 50 hectares of veld stretching from Deer Park to Higgovale was burnt, and it took 16 firetrucks and more than 100 firefighters to bring the blaze under control.

As we head into fire season, which normally takes off in December, we should prepare for more of the same:

[Philip Prins, fire manager for Table Mountain National Park] told Our Burning Planet that the fire had begun as “a vagrant fire”: “Especially near Platteklip stream going up to Tafelberg Road — there are always vagrants in that area.”

He added that Rob Erasmus from Enviro Wildlife Services, “a qualified investigator” habitually used by SANParks to probe park fires, had sent him a photograph of where the “vagrants had sat; of where the fire had started”.

Informal communities living in the park, said Prins, “are an ongoing problem because we manage a park within a city… a lot of these vagrants come in during the night, or late in the afternoon. They move from the city into the park; early morning, they move again from the park into the city, you know, and so it continues.”

By the time investigators had found the area where the fire is said to have started, the vagrants were “long gone”.

There is no easy fix to this fire hazard, and there are also suspicions that in the past, some have intentionally started fires.

Last year, a man was caught red-handed in Vredehoek’s Van Riebeeck Park, with suspicions that he could be linked to other fires in the area.

Putting aside the manpower required to fight these fires, and the fact that people put their lives at risk to protect the city’s residents whilst doing so (one firefighter was injured and treated in hospital this weekend), there is also the issue of the cost of these efforts:

Apart from ecological damage, fires are an expensive business, Prins pointed out.

“People don’t understand how expensive a helicopter is — the flying rate… I just received it last week. It went up from R34,000 per hour to R36,000 per hour. That’s what we pay for a Huey [helicopter]. And that’s not even the standing cost,” he explained. “If we have these big fires and we go into what we call an ‘extended attack’, we’ve got three, sometimes four, helicopters flying for eight hours a day.”

That’s just aerial resources — not even factoring in vehicles, equipment and staff salaries.

The ‘mop-up’ operation is expected to continue until Wednesday, and the public is urged to steer clear of the area during this time.

Anybody who sees an injured or displaced wild animal is encouraged to contact the Cape of Good Hope SPCA on 083 326 1604.

[source:dailymaverick]