UNDERGROUND INFERNO
Yes, the flames have died on Saddleworth Moor. But there’s a new hidden foot-melting menace as the beaters battle an...
I’MON top of Saddleworth Mo or, and my socks are on fire. The soles of my boots have melted. I’m wearing a face mask, but my throat is burning, my eyes streaming.
I’m embedded with A Company of the 4th Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland (4 Scots), and have just completed an hour-long march across a landscape as barren as the moon.
I assume it’s safe, given I’m being led by Major Phil Morgan, but even he admits the fire is unpredictable.
The ferocious flames might have died down on this, day six, but an even more dangerous inferno is raging just a few feet below us.
Sudden tongues of flame lash out from the blistered ground, as if from nowhere, making us look as though we’re dancing, not fighting the worst wild fire in living memory.
The burning heather was a sideshow. As one soldier told me: ‘It’s the peat that’s the problem.’
Several feet of it. Its only purpose in life, it seems, is to burn.
As Fred W orr all, professor of environmental chemistry at Durham University, said last week: ‘It’s like setting fire to your compost heap.’
It’s an environmental disaster, too: unlike an oil slick, the detritus is harder to see. But millennia of stored carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere. The fire is travelling horizontally, in secret. When a flame bursts through, a team of Greater Manchester firef i ghters armed only with paddles try to put it out. It looks an impossible task.
‘Look at that, it’s so beautiful,’ the Major says during a brief moment of respite, indicating the Peak District National Park. This is a famous beauty spot, teeming with wildlife and sheep.
Not any more. The part we’re on, right in the thick of the fire, is privately owned. Every hillside is smoking for more than four miles and counting. The gamekeeper visited the day before, doubtless blaming the smoke for his tears.
Due to the intensity of the fire it will take ten years for the moorland to recover. There will be no shoots, grouse or green, come August 12th.
The Fire Brigade – not just from Manchester but other counties, including Yorkshire and Gloucestershire – has been helped by 100 soldiers.
As the Major says: ‘Firemen are good with hoses. Soldiers are good at digging trenches.’
While I can see firemen from 25 engines or ‘ pumps’, each with 25 litres of water on his back, trying to cool the peat, it just isn’t enough. Water turns to steam. Even a helicopter dropping 65,000 gallons of water on the flames on Tuesday was a wash-out.
The fire is still raging out of sight, biding its time.
Deployment of eyes in the sky – several drones – is pointless when you can’t see below the ground. And so it is back to oldfashioned methods. Digging. And sweat. And more digging.
I join one shift of 31 men. They started at 3pm, and will finish at ‘ 2300 hours’. Copy that. They are digging trenches – between 100 yards and 200 yards an hour – to cut off the subterranean flames. It’s harder than it looks: there are roots and roasting- hot rocks. But the boys are in good spirits. How are they getting on with the firemen? ‘Great,’ says Lieutenant Mike Weir, team commander. ‘We share a similar sense of humour, which helps. They’ve taught us a lot.’
It’s now almost 30C. ‘This is cold,’ jokes Joe Stirling, a 24year-old Highlander. ‘In Iraq, it was 50 degrees.’ Do they resent the manual labour? ‘I wouldn’t say it’s enjoyable, but it’s different. I joined the Army to help people. It’s our job. We have a laugh. You don’t realise the time has gone by.’
After three hours, I can’t take any more. We head back to base camp, passing a Land Rover belonging to wild fire specialists from South Wales. They look worried.
‘Manchester has had enough sorrow,’ says one.
I return on Saturday afternoon. As I approach the small town of Stalybridge, I can see the smoke, even thicker than yesterday. It’s still hot but the wind has picked up. The last thing we need.
As I arrived at base camp on Friday, I was reassured to see a Co-op delivery van leaving, having disgorged Snickers bars and sausage rolls and endless, endless bottles of water.
This is England, I remember thinking. Not California. Not Sydney. Natural disasters (the cause of t he fire is still unknown and the subject of a criminal investigation) don’t happen here.
It’s deemed too dangerous for me to go up on the moor. I wonder at two cyclists, undeterred. Do they not realise the world is changing, faster than we think?
Manchester’s Mayor Andy Burnham, has pledged the 4 Scots for three more days, but no one thinks that’s enough. Secretly, I think everyone is praying for rain. Or a miracle.