Did anyone see Exmoor on fire last night?

I went up to Aldermans Barrow and you could see it sweeping slowly across the moorland.

There were aparantly 100 people fighting the fire last night,This morning another 4 fire engines went flying past .

Does anyone have any news?

yes unfortunatly I do, having surveyed the area burnt this afternoon after the fire brigade finally got all the fire out it would appear that approx between 700 and 900 acres of moorland has been burnt. I am sure some farmers will think and even say thats good there will be more grazing and it will reduce the ticks etc etc. It is NOT good, I have spent the last 10 years managing this area of moorland (and the surrounding area not burnt, approx 1800 acres)in a different way as part of an experimental moorland management scheme, this has also involved harvesting and planting heather. The biggest cost burden to us as a farm now is going to be the purchase of 200 tons of barley straw @ £70-£85 per ton each year for at least the next 2 years ( £14,000 - £17,000 per year)   The reason being as part of the moorland restoration scheme we have utilised the molinia litter within our winter bedding program for housed cattle, as the figures above show this has been a huge financial saving to our business, not only that because the cattle bedded on the litter  have built up a huge resistance to the ticks and tick bourne associated disease`s, to say I am gutted is an understatement, I basically stood and watched yesterday as 10 years work and management went up in smoke, and why ?, because some mindless moron saw fit to set fire to the moorland for reasons best known to themselves, it is highly probable that it is local person who`s family also have land.

and to answer your question re fire fighters, there were somthing exceding 20 appliances and certainly 70 plus people, what the hell did that cost, not to mention the police helicopter which was relaying images to the gorund support team to establish where to ferry firemen to be most effective, this morning whist the Dulverton appliance was here a house firwe started and reports were coming through to the guys sat in their truck that the flames had ripped through the roof, another engine from Bampton was alerted to deal with the fire. Friday evenign there were appliances from Bridgwater,wellington and they even had one coming from Exeter, the potential consequences of the actions of the mindless moron who started this fire here do not bear thinking about, when they are caught, and I am confident someone will be caught, I suggest they are looking at a custodial sentance at best.

I clicked onto the BBC Somerset site and watched some video of your fire service.  Clearly out of their element.  They need to send a few fellows over here next spring to intern with us, or down to Victoria to do a stint with the CFA.  We note the few professional city fire services in this state never are very effective on big wildfires.

We have had some big fires round here in past years. I do wonder sometimes why the fire fighters did not get on and control-burn fire breaks instead of rushing in trying to put the fire line out.

I was told it was because they are trained to put fires out, not carry out controled burns.

how do you tackle them  Kansas?  

I will come off as a real smart alec on this I imagine.  I did visit Exmoor, but I don't exactly remember the topography, what I saw on the BBC video looked plenty driveable in a 4WD vehicle.  First problem I see is dragging hose.  You can't fight a 1500 acre fire dragging hose around.  You have to have trucks that pump on the go and ride.  It is one thing to have to drag a little hose to put a few spot fires out, it is completely useless to try to drag hose on a mile of fireline.  The bit mentioned high wind...you can't fight a headfire of any size straight on in high wind, you have to start at the end and catch the headfire.  There will be two sides of the fire if it started at a single source, one side will be more or less a backfire, the other will flare from time to time and almost be headfire, most fires from a single source are V shaped, with the origin being the point of the V and the headfire being the wide end of the V.  You start at the origin and follow the sides up to the head fire, then come along behind the headfire if you can catch it, the problem is in truly high winds with dry fuel you can rarely catch the headfire, so you set a backfire along some natural or manmade boundary that makes it easy to put the backfire out, it can be something like a road, in lightwind even a cowpath will do, or you simply follow the headfire up the sides until it comes to a natural boundary.  Ordinary firetrucks(house pumpers) are fairly useless because they are not pump on the go units, you need brush trucks that are 4WD you can ride and shoot water from. 

The part of the BBC video that made me nearly laugh out loud was the commanding officer telling the newscaster they were going to quit for the night because it was dangerous....the best time to fight fire is night because the humidity comes up and generally the wind goes down.  3 factors figure in heavily on brush and grassfires, fuel load, wind(both speed and direction) and humidity.  Fuel load is going to be a constant, there is a given load of fuel at the fire scene but the wind speed and direction and the humidity varies with the time of day.  The higher the humidity, the less water it takes to put fire out, so nighttime with its normally higher humidity is the time you can get ahead of a fire if you couldn't during the day.  I posted alot of fire pics on my gallery bovey, quite a few are from a 2-3000 acre fire we got out in 5 hours using a well placed backfire.  We did that with 8 brush trucks and one tanker, and 22 guys. 

yep kansas ur right, part of what you say could be smart alecish, photos and film do not really give the true appreciation especially the topography, a supacat 6 wheel atv with water bowsers on will usually go accross most wet conditions like an argocat or similar, parts of the areas we were going on especially when we got it stuck were sheer bog, some of the firemen wanted to drive their landrovers out to begin with, they changed their opinion once they had been out, hence the reson at nightfall some of them wanted a helicopter to be lifted back to base, yep agree they are not used to fighting this sort of fire so it probably would not be wrong to a think it looked like the operation was over egged !

If it was that wet it should have all been backfired, but I have a hard time believing it was too wet to drive on, and still yielded that strong of a fire(what was reported, not what the video showed).  The video I saw the fire wasn't that severe, much of it could have been put out with ATVs and 25 gallon tanks, especially with a little foam, but of course I may not have seen the worst of it.  I did find a Youtube video that showed park rangers doing controlled burns on Exmoor, for the same reasons we do them here, I thought that was really interesting to know. 

kansasfarmer:

but I have a hard time believing it was too wet to drive on,

Not being familiar with the area, but difficulties are shown up in the name Exmoor, "Moorland" could possibly a big area of it will be peat, covered by ten year old rushes and dead vegetation, and the wet areas can also be on the higher ground as well, so its very different travelling to that in Kansas, perhaps someone from that area could fill us in on the topography of Exmoor.

the area makes up part of the royal forest of Exmoor,there are no trees,( 1300ft to 1500ft above sea level) the area burnt has been largley covered by molinia ( purple moor grass/sedge grass), for genrations, its dominance has been maintained due to the ¬burning management, we had adopted an alternative to that which benifits us better, molinia once burnt is rampant and it will now look like a field of wheat,( it has basically been fertilised) august once it has grown to maximum density and height it will turn a purple colour, from then on it will gradually die back and by christamas it will be beige/white and it just lies on the top of the ground, in real windy times it blows into the hedgerows and hangs on fences.the ground underneath is peat, some ares deeper and therefore wetter, in a dry spell such as we have had lately the litter is lay on the top just like paper. The flames at the front of the fire were 2 to 8 foot high depending on density of litter, and yes in a controlled burn you tend to backburn to get a better clearance of litter, only a prat would set fire to it though in the conditions we had on friday,

To answer the question re how wet the area is kansas, when the supacat was stuck we had to be very carefull where we were walking, a bit like quick sand, I have lived here for 26 years and that is the first time I have ever ventured that far across the Trout Hill bog ( approx 65 acres)

The fire was in the paper yesterday,But there was another fire down the road at the same time which could not be put out.

It was a house fire in Dulverton that my freands Grandad rents out and had just renivated,and the firemen were to busy on the moor so they had to send them out from Bampton and weveliscombe.

 It a shame the got rid of theold spray planes. You would have thought that if it took to long or was too hard to get at by foot or vehicle on the ground they would have got some of the aircraft in from France.

France is a fair old way from yer.

there is a 8 wheeled buggy in Porlock with a tank on but its only small.

 actually by fight its not as far as you think at most it would think, in a small helicopter you can do from south east kent to Ireland in a couple of hours and the planes are usually quicker.