One year ago today, almost exactly to the hour, i was driving back from a mountain rescue team training exercise with a colleague. We passed beneath Higger Tor and the pair of us smelt smoke. A lot of smoke. ‘Either Sheffield is alight or the moor is on fire’ we said to each other. We got past Higger towards the cattle grid and saw that Burbage Moor was indeed alight.
That night and the following days will live long in the memory of many of us.
I wrote at length about the chaos of that week in May last year ( here ). Emergency services, wardens, volunteers, farmers, gamekeepers all being ran ragged by fire after fire after fire.
I’m writing this sat on the Moor. Some of it is healing. Much of it still carries the scars. The initial ‘corridor’ of burn out from the barbecue site site is still visible – as is the end of that where the slightest dip allowed the breeze to get under the flames and fan them out. Heaven knows how much flora and fauna was killed that night.
A kestrel passes low overhead me now looking for its supper. Nature moves on.
I haven’t got as many words to write this time. 30,000+ people read the post about the fire. In the year since i’ve been but one very small cog in a stretched and underfunded wheel just trying to spend some of my spare time caring for the countryside hereabouts.
There isn’t enough funding to educate people about the countryside – be that in schools or with ‘boots on the ground’ doing engagement. That needs to change, but to be honest i don’t see how or when.
In the year since the Burbage Moor fire the staff and volunteers at the Eastern Moors Partnership have dealt with an average of 4 to 5 fires every weekend. Every weekend. All year round.
Most weekends there are 2 or 3 wardens trying to keep an eye on the swathe of moorland along the Western fringe of the 4th largest city in England. We’re getting quite good at spotting the outline of a BBQ in a carrier bag at 300 metres, or the sense that those people going in to that beauty spot intend to light a fire. Our ‘hunches’ are increasingly accurate and technology helps too.
The watch from the local fire station came out two nights ago and put new notices up urging people not to light fires or have bbq’s.
We have a 100% success rate in putting out the fires that we see and get to and a 96.5% ‘success rate’ in moving people on away from the spot on which they elect to light a BBQ / fire or indeed off the Eastern Moors estate. The other 3.5% required assistance from one of the two local constabularies.
But we can’t be everywhere all of the time. There is a wide and effective network of folk who whatever professional or leisure reason are out on the moors and together we keep our eyes open and do what we can.
None of us want to see, smell and hear anything like the night of 30th May last year ever again.
( Polite notice – the words and photographs herein are all ©️ me. Please do not rob them )