ralphpina.com

Murray, VWS crew leader, exits the Squirrel The latest fire that swept through the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve last week was nothing short of disastrous. Young veld burnt again and all the eleven-year old veld has been destroyed, so that, in the words of a nature conservation official, “everything between Kleinmond and Paarl” is uniformly less [...]

Amazing photo isn’t it? See Andrew’s fantastic photos of VWS Jonkershoek operations and read the VWS report. The fire started after a lightning strike. Hats off to the volunteers for their selfless service in support of CapeNature and SANP in defending our unique biodiversity (I can’t claim to have been there as I was trekking [...]

Unfortunately – and unsurprisingly – my words were prescient: it has indeed become an “interesting” summer in the Boland mountains. Since December Volunteer Wildfire Services Jonkershoek (VWS-JNK) has been called out at least 6 times to fires in the local mountains (“local” is a relative concept – in our case it means 290 000 ha [...]

As I was contemplating a short post about the Volunteer Wildfire Services (VWS), and specifically its rookie branch in the Jonkershoek valley, we were called out to mop up a plantation fire above Rozendal yesterday at around 6 pm. It was our first op since 27 Jonkershoek volunteers qualified in November – so there was [...]