On Sunday Action Ads’ Julie sent me a text: “Three years ago our hills were orange with flames.” It was the 3rd anniversary of the devastating Garden Route fires that raged from Sedgefield to Plett.
Julie saw the first orange glow at dawn on 7th June 2017 way over at Dam se Bos. Little did she know that before the night was out their house would be one of over 900 houses in Knysna that burned in the worst fire in the region since 1869. Most of you will never forget that day, what happened to you, what you did in response. The fires raged for 72 hours, driven by hot, gale-force winds. They burned telephone lines, cell phone masts and electricity lines. There were power cuts, water cuts and communications blackouts. The N2 was closed. Around 8000 people were evacuated. Some residents fought with garden hoses through the night to save their homes. Around 900 houses and 150 shacks were burned. Seven people lost their lives. According to a CSIR/Stellenbosch University Report the Knysna fires were “arguably the worst wildfire disaster in South Africa’s history”. It said 19,000ha were burned including many thousand hectares of timber plantations. Flames were 40m high in places, and a disaster manager estimated that at its peak the fire consumed a house a minute. The monetary cost was R3-billion, of which R2.2bn were insurance claims – the biggest claim for a single event in the country. One factor that contributed to the veracity of the fire was the “fuel load”, particularly the amount of alien vegetation that burns faster, higher and hotter than indigenous vegetation. One would have thought the Garden Route would have had a massive alien-eradication programme since then. Sadly, this is not the case. Dirk Smit, manager of the Southern Cape Fire Protection Association said the alien problem was now “three times worse” than before, particularly on private land. “It is a ticking time bomb. A lot of the alien seed bank germinated after the fire, especially wattle, and it’s gone mad, like hair on a dog’s back. There were so many forums and symposiums after the fire, and talk about what would be done about aliens, but now it’s business-as-usual,” Smit said. Yet Knysna municipality’s environment department said it was working closely with the chief fire officer to get “key landowners” in the municipality and on the urban edge to clear aliens. It gives free herbicides as an incentive. Smit said although landowners were legally required to clear certain aliens, in reality there were very few prosecutions. Johan Baard, a scientist at the Garden Route National Park, said forestry companies had mostly done a good job of alien clearing. “But on much of the private land it is probably infested more now than before the fire.” We can’t control droughts or high winds, but we can control alien vegetation. The Garden Route urgently needs an alien-clearing champion to integrate the apparently disjointed efforts of the many government and NGO groups, who can raise funds and keep the programme going. What is the alternative? Hoping it won’t happen again?
