GOING HOME
Tasman residents return
Hundreds of relieved Wakefield residents evacuated three days ago over fears the rampaging Tasman bushfire was heading towards them are glad to be home.
Firefighters continue to battle the sprawling blaze from the land and air a week after it was seemingly sparked by a contractor ploughing a tinderdry field.
Authorities yesterday admitted the fire, 30km south of Nelson and largely burning in forestry plantations, is not yet under control and could take weeks — if not months
— to put out.
At 4pm, the 3000 residents of the town of Wakefield got the green light to go home from Civil Defence controller Roger Ball.
Jeff and Rose Wray were among the first to return, escorted by police officers and soldiers who will patrol the town’s streets overnight.
“It’s good to be back finally . . . it’s good to have a home to come home to,” Jeff said, as helicopters buzzed up Pigeon Valley behind his house, where it all started last Tuesday.
“It’s pretty hard on everybody in the community who had to leave.
“A lot of people didn’t wanna go — us included — but you gotta try and help the emergencies services out who are doing their bit to make everybody safe.”
It’s a close-knit community, Rose said, and they’ve been leaning on each other for support.
Miles and Brenda Palmer didn’t feel ready to be booted from their homes on Friday. But yesterday they were glad to return with their dogs Russell, Bertie and Betty.
And they’ll be more organised if they have to flee again. The suitcases are by the door.
“There’s a lot of things you forget,” Miles said. “We only thought we were going for one night. That’s where people got caught out.”
The first thing he did when he got home? “Crack open a beer.”
Phil Bell, owner of Four Square Wakefield, was relieved that the cordons were lifted.
The sudden closure of the town was a shock, he said, but they’ve all rallied around. “Lives are more important than anything else,” Bell said.
Acting Tasman district commander Inspector Zane Hooper asked people who are not residents to stay away from Wakefield last night.
Hooper asked for people not to become complacent just because they cannot see flames and urged Wakefield residents to stay ready and be ready to evacuate again at any time.
There’s no rain on the horizon, with forecasters doubtful of any drops in the next 10 days.
A team of volunteer firefighters from Canterbury who’ve been battling the blaze since Friday came off the hill after 6pm last night.
They were sooty, sweaty, grubby and shattered when they spoke to the Herald in Brightwater.
They’re on a five-day rotation, working gruelling 12-hour shifts.
“It’s extremely physically demanding . . . all day,” said Justin Gilmore from Sefton Voluntary Rural Fire Force in North Canterbury.
They’ve been using handtools, shovels, and hoses along with heavy machinery to tackle the fire, which is burning deep under the dry ground.
Diggers are churning over the charred ground before the firemen douse it down with water. But they’re having to go back hours later, or even the next day, to check it hasn’t flared up.
“It’s just go, go, go,” said Ewen Peat, from Bottle Lake Voluntary Rural Fire Force. “By day five, we’re going to be absolutely rooted.”
But as Neville Barkhausen of the Canterbury High Country Fire Team said, the plight of the locals whose lives have been so disrupted is what keeps them going.
It is a week today since something sparked a grass fire in a parched paddock of Pigeon Valley, 30km south of Nelson. The heat soon ignited nearby forestry that had been exposed to the fierce sunshine blazing on a region that had seen only 6mm of rain in January. Within two days last week the fire had spread to an area four times the size of Auckland’s CBD. Houses on surrounding farms were evacuated and by the weekend, as the fire continued to rage, about 3000 people, including from the nearby town of Wakefield, had gathered up some belongings, and pets, and fled from forecast wind that would bring the fire in their direction.
On Sunday they were lucky. The wind did not arrive. Yesterday the Wakefield residents were told they could return to their homes last night. Fire chiefs were able to catch their breath, with the blaze contained — though they expect the area to continue burning until March.
Destroying 2300ha of trees, it has been one of the largest forest fires New Zealand has experienced, bigger than the Port Hill fire near Christchurch two summers ago and as big as another fire near Nelson in 1981. All are eclipsed by a blaze that seared 30,000ha in the central North Island in 1946 and a fire in Canterbury’s Balmoral Forest in 1955. But as with any major fire, floods or other extreme weather event today, it carries an ominous resonance with climate change.
Is this the sort of thing we are going to face more often? And are we capable of dealing with it? How well did the emergency services deal with them?
It is too soon to answer those questions but not too soon to acknowledge the work of about a hundred firefighters from around the country deployed by Fire and Emergency NZ, the Defence Force and the Department of Conservation.
They created firebreaks around the burning forest using bulldozers and chemicals dropped from fixed-wing planes while helicopters dropped water from monsoon buckets. In some places they fought fire with fire, setting trees alight to stop the inferno if it reached them. They faced the possibility at any time that the wind would strengthen and carry the fire across their defensive lines.
Credit is due too to the civil defence authorities who allowed farmers back into the evacuated areas at times to check the welfare of their stock, and allowed those evacuated to take pets with them. These are not always among the considerations of officials in a civil emergency.
The residents of Wakefield and the farming valleys, for their part, appear to have evacuated their homes calmly and sensibly when advised to do so. They gathered in good spirits generally as they faced the awful possibility their house and belongings might be reduced to a charred ruin.
And there was an abundance of food and other help provided by the communities receiving the evacuees. Friends and family have provided many with accommodation. It might be too soon to call the emergency over and take stock of the damage, but there have been no reports of loss of life. For that we can be grateful.
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