Fighting Fire with Fire

So there I was, driving home thinking to myself that I have been bitching so much on here lately about the state of our country, politics, violence, land-claims and drought and just how fucked all of the above leaves me. I thought to myself that I should do a slightly more positive post when I get home.

The next minute I just see clouds of smoke rolling towards me, pretty much from every direction. I carried on driving, and soon the cause of the smoke became clear, the dry and helpless bush-veld was burning. As I drove deeper into the overwhelming smoke, you could see the flames licking over the mountain peaks in the background, and a sudden chill ran down my spine - Is my family O.K? Is my farm in danger? What of my animals?

At this stage I was still a good way from home, but despite that I shifted gears and hit the fuel - I had to get home, and given the rapidly spreading fire I hardly wanted to get stuck here on the road, because a fire like this could easily close off my way to get home.

I drove through about 30 km's of smoke before I finally reached the dirt-road that lead into our farm, where I stopped for just a second to assess the situation, the fire seemed quite some way from the main road still, but I could see it moving closer at quite a pace, I already knew that the edge where I saw the fire initially was 30km's (that is about 18.6 miles, at least that is what google tells me) back, but the scary part was when I was looking ahead I could not see where it ended, the rolling smoke and fire seemed to go on forever.

I finally reached the family farm to find that our farm had not been touched by the fire, and with a great sigh of relief, and got my bearings in place. At this stage darkness was slowly creeping in and the rapidly spreading fire became more visual through the smoke.

As the fire spread through plantations, livestock farms and bush-veld alike, we started taking stock of other farms in direct proximity that were affected by the fire, and set out to help where we could. We loaded up the truck with whatever food and water we could spare for those who have been tirelessly fighting this raging beast up until now, and made our way to designated gathering points, where we would be given instruction on where we could be of assistance.

We were then instructed where to go, as there were numerous people that was in dire need of relief, and we quickly fell into place fighting fire with numerous other community members.

But here's the shit - being in the seventh year of a drought does not exactly leave you with enough water to contribute towards the cause, and beating a fire of this magnitude down would be a suicide mission. The best hope that we had, was burning the fire inward towards itself.

This means that you start a fire of a manageable size, and let it burn its way, then you start extinguishing that fire by walking behind it and beating it down, so that the new fire has no other way to go but towards the already existing out of control fire.

The only problem with this is that we are still in our windy season, and although the wind was still quite calm at this stage - this can very easily go very wrong if the wind decided not to play along with our plans.

For numerous hours community members worked relentlessly in shifts combating the fire, swatting the flames as they moved through the bush, and for a while it almost felt like all the efforts were not completely futile, as section for section, the still burning fires were contained, though not extinguished.

(Had I not known its destruction - this would have been a beautiful photograph.)

Hours that had felt like days passed at this stage, until the point that we too were relieved by new and or rested community members taking over from us.

However, not long after we got home, the wind started stirring heavily, making any and all attempts to combat the fire even more difficult than it already was. People tirelessly fraught the fire until early morning hours, when we were finally met by a soft drizzle of rain, It was hardly enough to extinguish the fires, but it did create a sense of hope for the people fighting the against these fires.

As you can see above the fires had left a devastating path of destruction (and these pictures were taken where the fire had already been burnt into itself,) and the damage that it has caused to lands, crops livestock and people alike is absolutely heart-wrenching.

We are currently gathering food and basic supplies on ground level for those in need that has been affected by the fires, but even having basic needs met, is hardly a consolation for everything that a person has lost.

The best that we can hope for now is decent rain to wash in a clean slate, with new opportunities and new life.