Fire fresh in mind as Covid knocks Knysna

Just before midnight exactly three years ago a roaring sea of flame engulfed Knysna, chasing terrified residents out of their beds and sending down a hellish soft rain of embers and ash.

In less than an hour a place of legendary beauty was disfigured, becoming a horror story that lasted several days and destroyed more than 800 homes.

Almost as suddenly a wave of charity transformed the Knysna narrative once again into a tale of redemption as truckloads of provisions poured into town, followed by politicians dishing out executive promises.

But three years on and the town seems perched on the edge of another disaster. An anniversary that was supposed to tell a tale of lessons learnt and preventative action is overshadowed by another, possibly more lethal, Covid-19 firestorm gathering to the east and west.

And the town must face the new threat with the knowledge that it has largely failed to deal with the last one — the conditions that caused the 2017 inferno still exist outside of town, in some places worse than before.

This week several environmental experts concurred that the grandiose plans to eradicate alien vegetation and buffer the Garden Route towns from future wildfire disaster have failed to materialise.

The promised funding has either dried up or been diverted elsewhere, and work teams have been unable to hold back the regrowth and spread of alien vegetation that exacerbated the 2017 fire and the even larger 2018 fire in the surrounding mountains.

There is reportedly an ongoing administrative muddle over fire management due to the involvement of all tiers of government — local, district and national.

“Now with Covid it is even worse because there is no money,” said invasion biology expert professor Brian van Wilgen from Stellenbosch University’s department of botany and zoology.

“It is quite appalling what is happening in the whole Garden Route area with invasive species. If you fly over the area in a helicopter you can just see the pine trees are taking over, spreading into the fynbos.

“They’ve been spending a bit of money here and there, but they don’t have a strategic plan and the problem is running away.”

Van Wilgen flagged several problems, notably insufficient buffering between wilderness areas and fast-expanding residential areas, the so-called urban wildland interface. Van Wilgen’s concerns and those of other scientists feature in a recently published book, Biological Invasions in South Africa, that details the risk posed by alien vegetation.

Gerhard Otto, Eden district council’s head of disaster management, said drought, floods and Covid-19 are putting strain on the entire area.

“In my view the money ended up in the national coffers,” Otto said.

“We were promised that it would come back to us again, but it has been so long now that the work to be done [on projects like alien clearing] is now triple what it would have been.”

Only about a third of landowners have cleared their properties of alien vegetation, according to Cobus Meiring from the Garden Route Environmental Forum.

The Knysna municipality this week acknowledged that “adversity may not yet be over” due to the threat of Covid-19.