Fire fighters continue to battle blaze in Elands River Valley

01 Feb 2016 | Admin Author

Fire fighters battling a massive blaze in the Elands River Valley area had a torrid time on Monday night, as four wind direction changes played havoc with efforts to contain the massive blaze.

The fire was started a week ago by lightning high up in the valley and has so far destroyed around 70 000 hectares of veld and fynbos.

Working On Fire provincial general manager, Ian Henderson, says they had to redeploy teams all through the night because of the strong winds.

He spoke to Algoa FM News a short while ago.

"Last night we had four wind direction changes which created problems for the management there. We had to redeploy teams all through the night. We did a big back burn which did seem to help slow one flank down a bit, but currently there are two area we are still concerned with, that's on the Elands River Community side, we expecting a wind change but hope it doesn't happen and on the other side we still trying to keep the fire out of Longmore Cape Pine Plantation."

"As we speak the fire status has not changed, it is still out of control and we busy monitoring it from the air at the moment."

"The helicopter is there, we have not deployed it because the fire is so big we don't know where to use it to the best advantage. What we are doing is to hold it in case any communities are threatened then we'll use it for that."

"Cape Pine is under threat and if it gets into that, there's some pine jungle there, Cape Pine will have a big problem. We trying to keep it out of that (area).