Experts warn of alarming upsurge in frequency and severity of firestorms

20 January 2019 - 00:00 By BOBBY JORDAN

The wildfire time bomb is exploding - and there's not much anybody can do about it except get out of the way.
Data compiled by experts shows an alarming upsurge in the frequency and severity of firestorms of the kind that ripped through Knysna in 2017 and the Overberg this month.
There has been a similar increase in firestorms in the summer rainfall area.
The increase is the result of a cocktail of population growth, alien vegetation and gaps in fire management policy, experts say. Recent studies also point to the impact of climate change on fire intensity and frequency.
This week the Sunday Times established that: There has been an alarming increase in fires in Western Cape wilderness areas, with the past three years recording the highest frequency in CapeNature's 90-year-old fire database;
The upsurge coincides with an increase in "fuel load" - overgrown areas that pose a grave fire hazard.
Highly flammable alien vegetation, such as pine trees, is spreading out of managed plantations and threatening adjoining towns.
Despite numerous warnings and studies, municipalities are largely unable to cope with the scale of the problem and clear the high-risk areas. Authorities in Knysna and Hermanus were warned about potentially devastating fires prior to the disasters there. The nub of the problem is urban encroachment into wilderness areas and a decrease in the number of prescribed burns - managed fires used to clear overgrown areas.
Without effective buffer zones, towns are increasingly at risk of catastrophic firestorms that are unstoppable in severe wind conditions.
Winston Trollope, scientific adviser to the government's Working on Fire programme, which supports land managers by supplying trained crews as part of a poverty relief initiative, said plant material had built up to disastrous levels.
"Plant fuels accumulate on an annual basis and have now reached disaster levels in urban areas where it is now impractical to apply controlled burns."
He singled out Hermanus as being a "disaster waiting to happen" due to thick stands of vegetation along the clifftop in the middle of a prime residential area.
Professor Brian van Wilgen, a fire ecologist at Stellenbosch University, said the fire management system was largely reactive.
"By and large they have to use limited resources to fight wildfires, leaving little capacity for prescribed burning. The whole programme of managing vegetation to strategically reduce fuel has all but disappeared, other than for the preparation of some firebreaks."
The experts also raised concern about regulations which make landowners responsible for their own bush clearing - and liable for damages if they lose control of a prescribed burn.
Christo Marais, chief director of natural resource management at the department of environmental affairs, said: "Fuel-load management through prescribed burning is a very high-risk activity. So land users . would rather wait until it burns in a wildfire and then do everything they can to stop the spread.
"With climate change, though, that approach is going to catch up on us. Those perfect firestorm days are a combination of old, dry material, high temperatures and high wind speeds. No reasonable person can then do anything to stop it."
Overstrand fire chief Lester Smith said the municipality had issued 125 controlled burn permits and conducted six burns itself in the second half of 2018.
"We are also in contact with [government departments] to issue directives to those landowners who are noncompliant," he said...

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