AUGUST 2018
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| A beautiful predawn sky over Finsbury on the 5th August 2018. Very peaceful. The next day, the fire hit! |
Well well, finally I get to post my blog for August. I have had such problems with my laptop and connectivity and, well, anything to do with computers. Anyway, better late than never...
August was a very busy month for the Estate and anybody who visited during this time will have noticed all the construction activity on the roads and weirs. I will leave the details of this activity for the quarterly news letter.
But what even overshadowed this activity was the runaway bush fire that we experienced. This is the story:
I was approaching a huge excavator machine from behind on my motorcycle on the road to the Miner's Cottage. I was to make sure the operator didn't miss the correct turning on this high altitude road. The operator saw me and began turning the behemoth so that I could pass. At the moment the tracks locked on the right side of the machine, I saw a small fire ignite between the tracks, caused by a spark between the steel of the tracks and a rock on the road. I immediately alighted from my bike and began to try to snuff the fire with my shoes and a small Protea branch plucked from a nearby tree. Within moments, Joseph, a labourer from Highland run, was at my side fighting the fire with his jacket. Even though the operator of the excavator joined in the fight with a fire extinguisher that was on board his machine, with the wind howling up there like it was, the fire pulled away from us in the opposite direction to the firebreak that was just behind us, egad!
With the wind howling like a banshee, the fire spread beyond the backburn point before we could even get there with the fire team. This was the beginning of the battle that would last for two days...
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| Part of the fire fighting team trying to reach the fire just below Goudkoppies. |
Even though the sense of community involvement was strong, with all our neighbours responding with their fire teams and even a Working on Fire team from Graskop responding, the wind was just too strong and the fuel load too large! Numerous attempts at back-burning failed and the fire spread alarmingly fast.
With the house keepers and other fire fighters stationed at each house, we managed to avoid any loss of property to the flames, although the fire only reached the houses in the Steenkamp's Valley at 04h00 the following morning!
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| The fire approaching the Whiskey River at 03h00 on the 7th August. |
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| A view of the fire from Rock Solid in the Steenkamp's Valley at four in the morning. We had to use hosepipes and beaters to keep the fire away! |
Environmentally, this was not a good time to burn a management fire and there was also a lot of fuel creating a very hot fire. But all is not gloom and doom. Below, I will highlight some of the Pros and Cons of an out of season fire like this:
PROS:
- A hot fire like this is devastating to trees. Most of the trees killed by the fire were Pine trees. Also, I prefer to ring-bark large Pine trees instead of felling them. This protects the grass beneath the Pines from being smothered by the acidic needles and the tree itself as it lies on the floor. The disadvantage of this method, though, is that it stimulates the tree to produce more cones (hence seeds) as it is dying. This, of course, results in many more seeds in the system and therefore many new seedlings begin to sprout around these areas. I have been using casual staff on Wednesdays to remove these seedlings, a labour-intensive task. Well, this fire annihilated all of these Pine saplings in the areas it burned (which was about two thirds of the Estate!)
-The fuel load was so high in many large areas of the Estate due to lack of burning in the last eight years. This not only increases the fuel load (moribund material) but also allows the encroachment and then invasion of indigenous woody shrubs (like Helichrysum wilmsii and H. kraussii) into the grasslands which ultimately reduce the vigour of the grass plants and allow the woody shrubs to replace the grasses. These woody encroachers require a relatively hot fire to kill them and that is exactly what this was. I was planning on burning all of these blocks over the next two years for exactly this reason before switching to the new, accepted method of a cool, mosaic burning regime which I can now start immediately from next season. With this regime, we will never have such a build up of moribund (fuel) again, which will prevent runaway fires like this from happening again.
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| Tranquility reigns in the aftermath as clouds pour over the watershed into the valleys with Mount Anderson center right in the background. |
CONS:
- There was little moisture content in the soil when the fire occurred and this puts stress on the storage organs of the grass plant. Especially when rains remain elusive for a prolonged period after the burn as is the case here. Fortunately we did have 21mm of rain soon after the fire which alleviated this problem somewhat. But rains are necessary, the sooner the better.
- With reduced growth due to lack of rain following a fire, the soil layer is left uninsulated and experiences hot temperatures in the day and cold temperatures at night. This also puts a certain amount of stress on the grass plant.
- When we burn management fires, we first wait for at least 30mm of rain before burning. This helps with the problem mentioned above but it also moistens the long grasses and bushes that make up the forest fringes surrounding the Afro-montane forests in the gorges of the grasslands. These forest fringes insulate the forest and allow a moister environment to develop in the forests which are necessary for the forest ecosystems to function. This fire was so hot and dry that it broke through many of these fringes and actually ignited the forest floors and burned into the forests, beneath the substrate, killing the trees as their roots were roasted! I spent 7 days after the fire trying to extinguish these fires. A truly demanding task!
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The patch of unburned grass in the photo is what is left of the 50 meter wide firebreak running from Mount Anderson's summit towards Unit 5. The fire didn't even slow down for this break!
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| Many days after the fire I noticed termite mounds still smoking. On investigation I found that the soil in the mounds was actually burning. Termites mix soil, vegetable material and saliva together to construct the mound. These Nasute Termites have periphery mounds so I do not think this phenomenon harmed the colony. |
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| The remains of new growth Pine which has been completely destroyed by the flames. This is one of the big positives of such a hot fire. |
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| All the debris on the floor of the Pine plantation above Unit 1 that was damaged by the hurricane some years back was removed by the hot fire. All that remains are the holes that were caused by the felled trees. |
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| Forest floor fire burning beneath the ground as it spreads and kills all the forest trees whose roots it encounters. |
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| Thomas from Kwa Puleng logs some very difficult community service hours carrying 20 liters of water up the steep slopes to help extinguish the forest floor fires in the forests near the Miner's cottage.. |
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| Helen from Rock Solid doing the same. The photo does not justify the steepness of these slopes. This was extremely testing work from these youngsters and their help is very much appreciated. |
Besides the fire and the construction work, we also had the usual holidays in August where we get many families visiting. This is the time of the year that the Moore's from unit 22 and I traditionally enjoy a camping excursion. We camped up near Little Joker Koppie because it was one of the few places that did not burn. It turned out to be a lovely area to camp. Below, find a gallery of this and a few new flower species I stumbled upon. Have a great month!
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| Our camp was situated at the edge of a small escarpment overlooking the Steenkamp's Valley. Here we relax in the shade of some Silver Sugar Bush trees at siesta time. |
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| Our high altitude camp site. |
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| We were up to watch the sun rise over Mount Formosa. Mount Anderson is ton the left. |
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| The spectacular flowers of a Balloon Pod, Lessertia frutescens, flowering between M3 and Morrin Pools |
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The final flowering specimens of the winter flowering Crassula compacta, found blooming near our camp in the high altitude grasslands of Emoyeni.
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