Fire In The Valley! – Part Two Updated

(Updated) 12th February 2012

First posted: 30^th January 2012

It has taken me a while to recover from the combined disruptive effects of the fire and a full week of rather pressurised work in Cape Town. In all honesty, I haven’t yet, and am – I hope – just beginning to claw my way out of the lowest trough since I first arrived here.  Three nights of uneasy, interrupted sleep during the fire were followed by three nights of encoding the day’s auditions until 03h00 and getting up early for another day in the studio. Even for the night-owl that I am, that’s pushing it!

So, back to… Saturday…

To recap from the end of my previous posting…  A fire-fighting helicopter interrupted a rather tedious morning of laundry and cabin cleaning, alerting me to two great plumes of smoke, one to the East, and another to the West – in the direction of Steve’s house!

When I arrived at Steve’s it was clear that they were in no immediate danger – however his friend Rudi, who has a large property on the top of the mountain clearly was. That situation though was fairly well under control for the moment, thanks to the presence of an off-duty Fire Officer from a nearby town, who was clearly very experienced, according to Steve.

Our immediate concern was for the farm on the slopes directly above Boggy Pond. The fire was burning backwards into the wind at an astonishing rate and would soon threaten the farmstead if unchecked, so I went off with Gerardt and his girl-friend Ingrid to see how we could help. Steve led the way to show us how to get onto the farm – he had borrowed one of Rudi’s quad-bikes, and was using it to good effect, charging between the various fires and playing the role of trouble-shooter and co-ordinator he is so good at.

The owner had been away, but arrived while we were hacking down saplings to use as beaters. A gaggle of locals – largely women and children, stood in the shade of a large tree, thrilled more by the sight of four helicopters near a small dam than they were interested in the fire. While the air wing sorted out a problem with the “Bambi Buckets”, we thrust beaters into the hands of the older teenagers and the farmer sent them off to attempt to contain the fire at a road higher up. Gerardt, Ingrid and I then rushed past beautiful fynbos flowers glinting in the bright sun to try to hold back the fire threatening them at a stony ridge nearby.

Even at the back of the fire, the heat was staggering! I suspect that some of the fynbos species are rich in oils, because low bushes nearly half a metre from the fire would suddenly erupt into flame all at once with a fierce hiss like water thrown into hot cooking oil. Once alight, it was very difficult to beat them out. Three seconds later they would flare again,  setting off the next.

With water supplies and tangled Bambi-buckets sorted, the helicopters growled into the air, at first going ahead of the fire to slow its spread downwind. They were soon grounded however, to save flying time and water, because the fire-front was about to burn itself into the back of the next fire along the ridge. The three of us continued beating where it seemed most profitable, letting the fire burn back to stony ridges where we had a better chance of putting it out and keeping it out.

There were two farm bakkie fire-fighters on standby, but they were no help to us. Firstly, they are small and intended to stop a fire getting out of control in the first place, or to contain a patch of fire which has leap-frogged and starting in a new area. Secondly, dragging a heavy water tank off-road into the path of the burn is just asking to get stuck and overtaken by an advancing fire, especially if the wind changes suddenly, which it most notoriously does in this area.

Lastly, the models I saw deserve an award for the dumbest example of engineering design I have seen anywhere on anything! The centrifugal pump is above the tank, so it requires priming (Filling with a can of water) before it can suck water out. If the operator is not conscientious about opening and shutting the right combination of valves immediately after use or re-filling the tank, it simply will not move any water. After watching an anxious operator pour ten litres of drinking water into a five-litre pump to no avail, I was able to figure out what he was doing wrong and close the right combination of valves by studying the design. The problem is that after a lifetime of pulling things apart and fixing everything from clocks to sports cars and lawnmowers, I have more practical engineering knowledge than the average University engineering graduate – no, seriously! The average farmhand wouldn’t have a clue!

Making the trailer a little longer and putting the pump below the waterline would eliminate the need for half the valves and make the unit less top-heavy. It would also work every time!

Back at the fire-line, Gerard, Ingrid and I were still at it, taking turns to withdraw to drink litres of water and keep an eye on our vehicles, parked for a quick getaway. I was alone on the line when I noticed that the choppers were back, now dumping water on the leading edge of our fire where it threatened to cross the fire-break road. I continued beating on the back-line, until I became aware of a helicopter nearby – very nearby! I looked up into the dribbling maw of a Bambi Bucket, barely thirty metres away and closing fast! Well, “opening” would be more accurate! I just had time to turn away from the several hundred litres of pond water that hit me squarely on the back. I quite expected to be flattened, but the wind was so strong it had already begun to break the water into spray by the time it hit me, so I managed to stay upright in the very welcome cooling shower! I was puzzled though by a smell I thankfully haven’t encountered in nearly forty years – DDT!

DDT was a “wonder pesticide” in common use during my childhood – the Fifties and into the Sixties – but it was banned by international consent some time in the Seventies I think. The South African Government though, persisted in its use for locust control, then for malaria control as late as the eighties. (Yup! Dirty secrets will out!) The smell was faint, so I’m assuming – if I was indeed smelling DDT – that the slow accumulation of it from run-off water over the years had been disturbed from the bottom of the dam by the gulping Bambi bucket.

With the wind calming, our fire contained, the flying-time budget limit in sight, and the small dam nearly emptied, the aircraft were grounded for a “fall back and regroup” session.

The operations director’s job is stressful – he has to balance helicopter flying time against a budget while deciding what to save, when he can have no idea how long it will take to fight a given fire, because a change in wind direction can change the odds in seconds… he also has to curb the enthusiasm of the pilots, who are very willing. As important as it is to save the fynbos or nearby crops, above all he has to focus on saving lives and property.

A call came through from Steve’s friend further along the mountain – the fire was threatening the house and water tanks. Having been there once or twice, I also realised that any fire-fighters would be entirely surrounded by fire. It was a long haul from the water source and involved flying through marginal, unsafe, wind-conditions in the kloof,  but the pilots were allowed a quota of two buckets each to do what they could.

With nothing useful for me to do, I swapped cell-phone numbers with the landowner, Johan van Zyl, before heading home to assess the danger to the cabin and find out where else I might be of use. As I drove into the town, it appeared that the helicopters had clearly found a serious situation at the threatened homestead, because they were now drawing water from a small dam below the main road through the village then swinging back up the mountain.

Back at the cabin I raided the last of Jeff’s store of iced water in the fridge and replenished the empty bottles. I was gulping my way through a second glass when my phone rang, flashing Mr. van Zyl’s number. He asked me to dash back to the farm, and described where he could be found. He had driven higher up the slope to try to prevent the fire crossing his fire break road, without success. On the way down, the heavy water-tank had skidded off the road on a hairpin bend, dragging his lightweight bakkie with it.

The road was so rocky and the gradient so steep that I had to stop my vehicle within sight of him, leave it stalled in gear, and run the rest of the way. By this time some farmhands and village teenagers had arrived to help. In spite of the danger presented by the advancing fire, Johan had wisely decided to empty the tank onto the surrounding fynbos, partly in the hope of slowing the flame, but mainly to make the trailer light enough to move. I just had time to notice how lucky he was – half a metre further and the tank would have rolled, probably taking the light utility vehicle with it down the long, steep slope. When we had attached a towing strap to a four-wheel-drive bakkie that had made it up the road ahead of me, Johan broke some unpleasant news; the brakes on his TUV bakkie were very dodgy! I decided to let the young’uns do the heaving, while I hefted a large rock, backing up in front of the pickup as it was eased onto the road so that I could jam the wheel as soon as the trailer was also back on the road. The strategy worked, and Johan set off to re-fill the tank before setting the farmhands to recovering irrigation pipes in the path of the flames.

Since the cabin was not threatened at that stage, I moved on to Steve’s, arriving just in time to hear that the house on the mountain had been saved, but that the water tanks – their only source of water so high up, were still under threat. Sandy fed me a hamburger, and by the time I was gulping a mug of tea, another call brought the news that the tanks had been saved. The bad news though was that the fire had roared ahead on the rising wind and destroyed both the wild and cultivated areas of the fynbos nursery farm, putting about forty local people out of work.

By early evening the fire had moved well away, over the mountain and into the next valley, leaving a huge pall of smoke between us and the sun. The smoke drifted South-Westwards, following the fire lazily as the wind died down, as it does here in the evening, when the wind stops as the air in the valley matches the temperature of the air at the summit. The dead calm was far from welcome though. The warm earth continues to heat the air, causing it to rise, drawing in more air, thus powering a wind. The next valley now had very warm earth. Our valley had very warm earth. Which of the many interconnected  valleys and kloofs would exert the greatest force and which way would the resulting wind blow?

As soon as it got dark, we got the answer – manifested by an angry red glow to the South West, growing ever brighter and looming ever closer. The fire was returning.

It burned a path steadily through the dense Bluegum woods toward the RDP housing estate next to me. I have an Eskom power line running up my Western boundary, so they had sent in a contractor early last year to clear an eleven-metre wide fire break, which was good news. At Jeff’s insistence the contractor had sawn the bigger trees into logs which could be carried, During the winter, villagers had made use of my invitation to take firewood, so all the larger logs had been removed. That was good news too. The bad news was that the bone-dry kindling was left in a long, instantly flammable line right against my woods!

A municipal fire-team was on the scene with a fire tender, so I could only hope that they could contain the blaze, which I could hear crackling from the end of the road to the cabin.  I started to write my blog about the day’s events, but walked to the end of the road every half-hour, trying to gauge the speed of the advancing inferno. The wind had abated almost completely, so at 01h00 I set an alarm for 03h00 and went to bed.

 

Sunday…

On Sunday morning, after completing the posting about treating the cabins, I took a break to collect my thoughts about the dramatic events of Saturday. As I pulled aside the curtain in the door of the cabin I noticed the light on the pale, sandy “stoep” area outside. Years as a photographer / DOP have made me very aware of the character of light. The colour was wrong for that time of day. Very wrong! I looked up, knowing that I was going to see smoke. I saw smoke – a lot of it. I followed it down to the source – much closer and thicker than yesterday’s plume, right in the settled area to the West of me, on the direct line to Steve’s home. I threw a rake, spade, panga and hosepipe into the pickup, locked the cabin, and charged off again, not realising how long and tense the day would become.

Over the years Steve has been conscientious about clearing his property of excessive alien vegetation, but poorly maintained adjoining properties still presented a huge threat. Blue gum trees are a species of Eucalyptus, whose leaves are rich in highly flammable Eucalyptus oil. A fire of this size could easily ignite the crowns of the trees where there is nothing to stop the wind fanning at a terrifying rate. He had been allowing saplings to grow under control to form a hedge near the chicken coop, and I was delegated to cut that down, while Sandy and some of the netball team girls continued to wet down the dry leaves on the floor of the woods. I have no idea how long it took to cut down about thirty metres of hedge. Adrenaline does wonders! I simply focussed on making each panga-stroke count, and selecting suitable fire-beaters from the saplings as I went, throwing them well away from the edge of the woods.

When I eventually looked up, I was alone. Earlier, Steve had gone to press-gang some of the youths to attempt to cut a fire break into the adjoining property, so I went in search of them. I first looked slightly higher up the hill, on Steve’s second property to the South East, but found no one, What I did find though was that the flames were roaring towards us along the crown of the trees on a neighbouring property, so I hastened back to find Steve, Rudi and the youths on the Northern side of the new threat, barely out-running the fire alongside them. The wind had shifted around them, making the fire-break they were trying to cut irrelevant – for the time being.

Wetting the floor of the woods had helped, but only to slow the fire, so we stayed to retard it further by beating out what we could, always keeping an anxious eye on the crown above us. Although just metres apart, we could often not see each other in the dense smoke. The leaves had unfortunately not been wetted near where I had cut down the hedge, and I have a vivid image of about three metres of  the floor igniting at once into a roaring sheet, ankle-deep around me, veined in crimson, yellow and angry orange.

A while later, Steve appeared through the smoke and yelled in my ear to get my bakkie off the property and help move the other vehicles to safety. We had parked in a large clear area near the house, at least a hundred metres from the fire-front, but as I arrived back there the grass between the cars and bakkies erupted in flame, ignited by a flying ember, or even a flaming branch, such is the force of the wind along the crown. Luckily Sandy and the girls were standing by with the garden hose and beaters. They reacted quickly enough to prevent disaster. I moved my bakkie to the junction with the main road, parking it on the verge, next to Rudi’s quad bike. I was out of the vehicle already when I was overcome by a very uneasy feeling. There were no flames nearby – yet – but I felt I needed to move. Cursing the immobiliser, I re-started, bounced through a ditch and a bunch of saplings to get onto the Hermanus road, and parked on the narrow verge a hundred metres up the hill. It had taken seconds to make the move, but as I slammed the door shut and headed back I saw a gaggle of labourers and youths bodily dragging the quad bike’s locked wheels across the road. The space we had parked in was engulfed in flames several metres high!

Steve’s preparation andmaintenance paid off – the fire was weakened by the lack of fuel on his property and on Gerhard’s next-door. This made it possible to contain the leap-frog fires and stop the conflagration crossing Hermanus road to burn it’s way to Caledon and the barley farms along the way. He had only managed to clear a small area around the derelict house of the new property though, so that was now covered in a carpet of Arctic-white ash between the charred trees. The wind changed again too and took the burn Southwards over the mountain again – for a while.

I have no idea how long all this took, but some time later on Sunday I found myself back at the cabin – sent there in fact to keep watch on my own situation, because the wind had turned again and was bringing the fire back over the mountain directly behind me. The first thing I did was to pack up my laptops, hard-drives and cameras and stash them in the cab of the bakkie. Even if I lost everything else, I could make a living somehow.

Steve’s fire precautions have taken nearly nine years – I have had this property for barely two years after it had been neglected for nearly a decade. Although I’ve started clearing the alien trees, I’ve cleared potentially productive areas first. They were also the most recently maintained, so it made sense to stop the Hakia and blue gum getting a firm hold again in those areas. Clearing the more mature, denser growth up the hill behind the cabin would take a lot more effort, money and time. Ironically, during this trip my focus has been to set Jeffrey to work on doing exactly that. We recently talked about widening the path around the boundary into a fire break, and we had both spent some time hacking away at the congested undergrowth behind the cabin to provide easier access deeper into the woods. We hadn’t though, begun to cut down the big trees near the cabin, which would really require a decent chainsaw. I had deliberately not positioned the cabin under any large trees because of the fire danger. Under the present circumstances though, any tree closer than about twenty meters represented a serious threat. I connected the hose and tried to spray down the back of the cabin, but it was now soaked in highly flammable waxy wood-preservative, which caused the water to run off immediately. I had brought down some recycled corrugated roof sheeting with which to make compost bins, and these were now stored behind the cabin, which gave me an idea. I lined them up against the wall, hoping to reflect the heat away. The workshop was new, dry, and exposed. If that caught fire, my little home would burn with it.

The fire was approaching on a broad front over the unburned section of the mountain – in fact now on two fronts, because the fire behind the RDP development had flared up again.

I grabbed the bush-saw and machete, went behind the cabin, and just stood there, feeling very isolated and powerless. By now I was exhausted and ached all over, with blisters starting to form on my cutting hand from two days of hacking at blue gum trees on other properties. Night was falling, there were too many trees to cut alone, and in any case, the task was just too daunting. It seemed as though anything I could do would be too little anyway.

Then the Cavalry arrived, clattering up the drive in two bakkies, one towing a Fire-Fighter!

I had met and worked with Kobus Visser and Katrin Pobantz during the 2010 “TessFes” and had barely seen them during the past year and a half. Kobus is a veteran farmer who has taken on a free-range chicken farm near Caledon. Because chickens are susceptible to everything down to a sneeze carried on the wind, the farm is heavily quarantined and difficult to visit. I still have no idea how he and Katrin knew of my situation, but he brought the amazing team from his sheep farm nearby and the team from the chicken farm, sixteen kilometres and two valleys away! They leaped off the bakkies, took the tools from my hands, and began creating a break around the cabin. Kobus assessed the situation, and told me to start packing, because if the fire reached me at all, no fire-break came with guarantees. With my survival essentials already in the cab, I now had a chance to save the borrowed fridge and microwave. I also managed to pack a suitcase with some clothes and throw it into the back. I even had time to grab the camera and take a picture or two, one of which caught a young girl hastening toward me.

She was almost in tears and had come from the double-storey wooden house just above Boggy Pond. “Please, we need somebody with a bakkie to help us move our stove and fridge. There are people there, but they say they are too busy watching the fire to help!” She was referring to bystanders – not to fire-fighters. With a dozen people hacking away at my woods, there ws nothing more useful for me to do, so I piled her into the bakkie and ground up the rutted road through our land to her home. I was followed by one of Kobus’s bakkies. Apparently Kobus had just been there, realised that there was nothing we could do about the massive trees towering over the house, and advised the family to evacuate. Wih the help of three young girls, I crammed the large refrigerator and stove against my own load and trundled into the village to Grandma’s house.

When I returned to the cabin, the team was packing up – Kobus was on the phone to Johan van Zyl, just above me. The fire had burned around the homestead, causing smoke damage but not igniting any of the buildings. Van Zyl and his wife were OK, but the helicopters would soon have to be taken out of the air and stood down on a safe farm near Caledon because of failing light. It was now up to the ground teams to try to slow the fire’s progress towards Bethos Kloof, a satellite settlement to the East of Tesselaarsdal.

Then it was a case of waiting…

As each state of alarm increased, then abated, I was able to load more stuff onto the pickup, left unlocked and parked for a quick exit.  I watched anxiously every half-hour from the end of my “driveway” until about 01h30, trying to gauge the direction and speed of the fire, knowing that the wind could change the situation in minutes. I just had to get some sleep though.  Across town, nearer to the fire, Steve and Gerard were standing watch in shifts,  so I draped my cosy blanket (A present from Vianne last winter) over the load and sprayed it with water. After setting an alarm for 03h00 I crawled fully dressed into my sleeping bag on the bed, hoping that I would be woken by the alarm, and not a phone call or a banging on the door!

 Monday…

By Monday midday the worst danger had apparently passed, so I was able to unpack the pickup, but didn’t have the energy to tidy everything. The fire had moved to the next settlement, the helicopters and Fire Brigade had it more or less under control, and we were all exhausted anyway. The wind was favourable, so I took a few hours break, visiting Steve & Sandy for tea and a post-mortem before extracting what I needed from the shambolic cabin for the trip to Cape Town on Tuesday…