Protecting our Concessions

So this weekend we went out to one of our concessions to do some fence maintenance and while we were busy in the veld on Saturday we got a call on the emergency radio channel that a fire has broken out just south of our concession and that the farm owner was in desperate need of help.

“Working on Fire” the local Fire fighting team have been fighting the fire since 3am Saturday morning and could use all the help they could get so we quickly loaded our fire fighting equipment and water and went out assist.

When we got to the farm it was devastating to see how quickly the flames engulfed everything and we knew that we had a long day coming before we would get the fire under control.

We were given the job of front line support, basically following the fire fighting front line and supplying them with water as they used back packs to spray water on the fire. This was the only way of fighting the fire in the hills of the Water berg as there are not many roads and the terrain is very slow going with big rocks.

We stopped the fire at 7pm that Friday night in our sector and we were all very exhausted but our spirits were high.The fire destroyed about 20 000 Ha at this point.

The fire was still raging in the other sector where the other team was busy and we went down to assist them but there were already so many people doing a good job we decided to head back to the concession.

Sunday morning the next call came through on the radio that the fire has started again and that support was needed, we quickly got everything loaded again and headed out to the new location of the fire and started supporting the guys from Working on Fire again.