Imagine a firefighter and you may picture Royston O’Reilly. The crew manager of Pontypridd White Watch is good-looking and heavily muscled: men like him are why women fantasise about being dragged from burning buildings. He is one of the good guys — and at this moment he is furious.
“We were on a call because there were two youths starting mountain fires with a petrol can,” he explains. “I was with the manager from Green Watch and the youths were goading us — they were far enough away to keep starting fires.
“Anyway, we followed them, putting out their fires with our beaters as we went along. We were so angry and frustrated thatwhen we came across little chicks that had burnt to death in their nest, that was it. We gave chase. I chased one of them for three miles, down through the village of Rhydyfelin, in my gear and fire boots, until we found him hiding in a hedge. I’ve seen awful things when fighting mountain fires, like burnt baby rabbits that couldn’t outrun the flames. It’s heartbreaking and needless and that’s why I ran after that kid.”
This is the summer season in South Wales or, more precisely, in Rhondda Cynon Taff (RCT), the county considered the wildfire capital of the UK. Never mind Malibu, California or Bunyip, Australia. If you want to confront the fear of being encircled by flames, just take a trip here.
In 2008-09 there were 2,427 wildfires started deliberately in South Wales. Of these, 869 were in RCT. The next worst county was neighbouring Caerphilly, with 350.
That wasn’t the worst period. In 2003-04 there were no fewer than 6,634 wildfire “incidents” in South Wales, 1,945 of them in RCT and 1,153 in Caerphilly. Fires around the village of Cwmfelinfach in Caerphilly burnt for four days over 800 hectares. The South Wales Fire and Rescue Service believes that 95 per cent of these wildfires are started intentionally.
My home town of Pontypridd in RCT is a place of great beauty. Today the sky is a deep blue and dense, cooling forest covers the steep sides of the valley. I consider myself lucky to be here — most of the time. But ask yourself this: how many times have you called the Fire Service in the past two years? Once? Twice? Not at all? Well, I have called a dozen times since Easter. In the past two years I have reported so many fires that I now do so with complete insouciance, in the same way that I might call my mother. Blame the glorious view from my home of the Graig mountain on the opposite side of the valley. The mountain is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a wildfire hotspot, one of RCT’s worst-hit areas, along with Aberdare and Tonypandy.
This is why the South Wales Fire and Rescue Service has joined forces with the Forestry Commission for Wales, the South Wales Police and Rhondda Cynon Taff County Borough Council, as well as the local Neighbourhood Watch association and the Community Safety Partnership, to try to put an end to this needless crime.
Mick Flanagan, head of the fire crime unit at the South Wales Fire and Rescue Service, has the tough task of tackling fires that are started deliberately in the area. He is forthright about the problem.
“They are called wildfires but I see them as arson. I get frustrated that they are not given the same priority. After forest, what’s next? A skip? A car? A school? When one fire engine is called out more than a thousand times each summer, at a cost of £2,000 per trip, all those so-called trivial fires add up to one big problem.”
In 2006-07, the cost of fighting grass and forest fires — in firefighting jargon, FDR3s — in Wales was £14.6 million. In that year there were 7,238 Welsh FDR3s, 4,572 of them in South Wales. The knock-on cost, to a county that already features in social deprivation statistics, is high, and besides the expense there are considerations of life and death.
“It doesn’t occur to the people who start these fires that one day we’ll be so busy fighting one, we won’t get to a house fire on time,” says Flanagan. “We can’t hope to save everyone if our engines are unavailable because they are tackling wildfires. What are the fire-setters thinking?”
The answer to that question is, no one knows. There is a general reluctance by the South Wales Fire and Rescue Service and the Forestry Commission for Wales to link the problem to social deprivation, although the longer explanations involve socioeconomic, topographical and environmental theories so varied that no one is any the wiser.
That is why Matthew Jollands has just started work on a project entitled “Wildfires in Wales: social drivers and investigation measures”. He is employed by the Forestry Commission for Wales and tasked with finding answers. “People think it’s down to bored kids,” he says, “but I want to test that theory. There haven’t been any convictions for these crimes so we can’t ask offenders why they start fires. It’s complex, though. If you look at the problem for long enough, so many strands appear.”
There are glaring incongruities. Since the blazes of 2003 there has been growing local condemnation of fire-setting — yet Crimestoppers ran a three-year campaign in response and received not one call. I have heard of a three-week-long mountain surveillance session by the police, who apparently found themselves surrounded by deliberately started grass fires, yet failed to catch the culprits.
Discarded cigarette ends and shards of glass magnifying the sun’s rays cannot be blamed. Fire Service experiments have shown that in the UK it is almost impossible for these to start a wildfire.
The South Wales Fire and Rescue Service is also looking for answers. Dave Ansell, its social marketing project manager, says: “All we have to go on is anecdotal evidence, which includes a tale of a man in his seventies setting fires as he walks his dog. We don’t even know if boredom is to blame. People get bored in other counties, yet they don’t start fires. And if they are bored in the dry season, what do they do when they are bored in the wet season? It is only by catching these people that we can understand them.”
That’s the problem. How can the South Wales Fire and Rescue Service target its efforts to tackle the problem if it doesn’t know who to target?
On Maerdy Mountain, another RCT wildfire hotspot, I am admiring the view when an unmistakable smell of burning reaches my nostrils. Below me, strips of charred ground are visible in the greenery. The steep, uneven slopes are tough to negotiate even when you are not battling wind-fuelled flames. Farther along the mountain road, I can see where flames have jumped the tarmac en route from the bottom of the valley to the top.
Yet these fires are in the middle of nowhere. Those that I witness almost daily begin in spots that are accessible in a few minutes from Pontypridd town — but surely no one would crawl halfway up Maerdy Mountain just to strike a few Swan Vestas before legging it. There are tales of scrambler motorbikes dragging burning ropes behind them, though, and the lager cans found at some fire-starting scenes have led some to conclude that the culprits must have driven into the mountains.
I was shown a recent CCTV film that captured two teenage boys emerging from thick smoke on a mountainside. They looked worryingly blank-eyed, as if the fire they were suspected of starting had done nothing for them. They pelted buildings with stones and ran back to the scene of their suspected crime when the fire crew arrived. Their cockiness was mesmerising.
As for the firefighters, “there is such a feeling of needlessness,” says Royston O’Reilly. “It’s so demoralising to know that once again we are going up a mountain. We all do this job to help people, we are highly trained in using our equipment and highly skilled at saving lives. Yet what do we do instead? Wander around on mountains, waving a metal pole with a rubber flap on the end of it. It makes no sense.”
When I sat down to write this article, I glanced through my window at the Graig mountain. It stood green in the sunshine and I realised that I hadn’t reported a fire for several weeks. It didn’t last. Hours later I glanced out again and saw a gash of freshly burnt vegetation scarring the view. I thought of Royston O’Reilly and the charred nest. It’s going to be a very long, hot summer.
