[imagesource: Rob Erasmus / Enviro Wildfire Services]

The start of Cape Town’s summer (which kicked off unusually late this year) usually means a few things.

Unrelenting wind, a battle to find parking anywhere near a beach (thanks, Vaalies), and the sound of choppers flying overhead as firefighters battle a blaze somewhere along the Table Mountain slopes.

Most recently, the Halloween fire from October 31, which was first spotted above Deer Park, led to some residents in Oranjezicht evacuating their homes, and battling the blaze proved to be a costly exercise.

At the time, Philip Prins, the fire manager for Table Mountain National Park, said the blaze was started by ‘vagrants’, which is a quite regular occurrence that keeps park authorities very busy.

The Daily Maverick’s Tiara Walters has written a superb, in-depth feature unpacking the park’s fire woes, but let’s start with Prins talking about an ongoing issue:

…Prins says that, in past weeks alone, crews have responded to and extinguished illegal “vagrant-caused” fires in various parts of the park, including Tokai and Red Hill towards the centre and south; and Oudekraal and Deer Park in the park’s northern sections.

High numbers of park visitors, and potentially illegal fires, may yet prove particularly true of the 2020/21 summer period.

“It’s just unbelievable,” says Prins. Head of the park’s fire operations since the reserve was proclaimed 23 years ago, he offers institutional knowledge spanning nearly 40 years of conservation service to the Cape Peninsula. Despite the hard lockdown this year, he says he has seen “a massive increase in visitor numbers”.

Fire investigators, who try and determine the cause of each blaze authorities respond to, say that of the 108 fires in the park during the 2019/2020 season, 58% were “associated with fires kindled for cooking, heating and socialising”.

Prins says this is due to vagrants who “move from the city into the park and, early the following morning, they move from the park back towards the city”.

Only a fraction of the fires attributed to vagrants are listed as “malicious”, and for the large part, the city’s homeless population are simply looking for a way to survive.

This is a point stressed by  Hassan Khan, the CEO of Haven Night Shelter welfare organisation:

Everyone wants pristine parks but few seem willing to support the most vulnerable people who have little choice but to survive on, or beyond, those park borders, he suggests…

Image: SANParks

“The idea that poor people by their nature will go in and destroy the park is a fallacy. We don’t support them materially. We just make political statements from time to time. But if people were to find utility in the natural environment, they would protect it. We need to create good spaces for everyone instead of building fences, and just hoping for the best that future generations will still be able to enjoy these parks.”

For R60, you can buy a homeless person five nights at Haven Night Shelter – more details on that here.

Fighting fires effectively is a costly affair, especially in the lead-up to December and January, which is peak fire season:

Cutting firebreaks, wide strips of land designed to stop fire from spreading, is an expensive, big operation: in the region of R2-million annually…

There is also the cost of the firefighter’s arsenal: the park helicopter is only on standby from 10 November each year; City helicopters are on standby from 1 December. Keeping a helicopter in the air now costs R36,000 an hour.

“We can spend up to R12-million on integrated fire management, depending on the season,” says Prins. “During a busy season, we spend more than that.

When you hear those choppers in the air for hours on end (there are sometimes multiple choppers on the go at the same time), the bills start to stack up.

If you would like to donate towards Volunteer Wildlife Services (VWS), you can do so here.

You can find out more information about joining the organisation here, with recruitment drives taking place each year.

It’s also worth saving these numbers for reporting fires.

[source:dailymaverick]