Newsletter
March 2001 The fire started on Wednesday 21 March 2001 at approximately 4 pm about 5km from
our farm at a small black settlement called Velapi. By 6pm it was raging up the
mountain and towards us from the East side. By 6pm we had mobilised the farm
crew and the tractor drawn 7000 litre fire tender and we headed for
the top of the mountain. The rest of the farm crew were alerted and
were brought in from Botriver a small town 10km away where most of
the labourers live.
By about 8pm it was decided that a drastic back burn was necessary to kill the fire. So
that's where the work and the long night ahead started. We started the back burn
on the top of our mountain and started working downwards. We slowly made
progress. One area which needed to be back burned  was rather tricky as the wind
was blowing directly across the road. If we had lost control of the burn there
the fire would have jumped and burnt right though our forest plantation.
It was rather nerve racking. One piece of back burn which was only about 1.5-2 km took
7 1/2 hours. We had to do it carefully and slowly to prevent losing control of
the fire. We managed to catch the fire at the bottom of the mountain just in
time to start the next bit of back burn.
 Had we not gotten there in time it would have taken us even longer trying to get the fire under control.
At about 2 pm Thursday afternoon we were satisfied that we finally had the fire under
control. We had spent almost 20 long hours in the mountain and were all rather exhausted
and extremely dirty. A good long, hot shower was desperately needed.
Altogether about 300 ha of our farms' private nature reserve, "RUWAMI" was burnt.
In two years time we expect that the veld will have fully recovered and that we
will have lovely pictures of post-fire bulbs and other species.
Unfortunately there was not much time to take night shots and the camera's battery died on us
in any event. Have a look at some of the pics from after the fire.
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