The Cape Aflame – Cape Town's Dance with Fire - PDF free download eBook

Introduction

In the furnace heat of early March 2015, the Muizenberg Fire introduced Cape Town to climate change, a new era of integrated wildland firefighting, and the immediacy of threats to the Western...

Some brief overview of this book

In the furnace heat of early March 2015, the Muizenberg Fire introduced Cape Town to climate change, a new era of integrated wildland firefighting, and the immediacy of threats to the Western Cape's biodiverse Fynbos Biome. Sweeping from coast to coast, the largest single wildfire in Table Mountain National Park's 12-year history razed 5,120 hectares of fynbos, four homes a In the furnace heat of early March 2015, the Muizenberg Fire introduced Cape Town to climate change, a new era of integrated wildland firefighting, and the immediacy of threats to the Western Cape's biodiverse Fynbos Biome. Sweeping from coast to coast, the largest single wildfire in Table Mountain National Park's 12-year history razed 5,120 hectares of fynbos, four homes and a luxury resort.

Threatening the city's marginal Wildland Urban Interface – breached when Tokai Plantation exploded into a full-fledged firestorm, the runaway blaze was met by an integrated fire-management system born of international experience and centuries of dancing around the management of wildfire. Under a rage-red, smoke-filled sky, accompanied by the unmistakeable clatter of dozens of fire-fighting helicopters, bombers and spotter aircraft, 2,000 wildland and urban firefighters from across the country worked tirelessly and with choreographed precision to avert disaster. Committed to their mountain and city, Capetonians rallied behind their firefighters.

Generosity and goodwill abounded. Nevertheless, after a week of potential cataclysm, the Mother City felt mugged by Mother Nature. The Cape Aflame – Cape Town's Dance with Fire, a graphic 176-page, hardcover, large-format publication selling for ZAR395, erases the sense of despoliation brought on by those fire-filled days of March 2015 by explaining how the Muizenberg Fire constituted both a "perfect storm" and a portent of things to come.

It forms a singularly 'complete' case study in that it does more than relate a story common to the approximately 20 wildfires raging elsewhere in the Western Cape at the time. It locates the Muizenberg Fire in the context of South Africa's vexed history of developing an integrated wildland-firefighting strategy able to counter the depredation of the Fynbos Biome by, amongst other things, a capital city pushed up hard against and encroaching on it. It considers how other factors – including urbanisation, alien vegetation, land transformation, climate change and myriad human activities pose a direct threat to the biodiversity of Earth's smallest plant Kingdom and World Heritage Site, the Cape Floristic Region – to which wildfire is as essential as water.

Using more than 200 photographs, 30,000 words and a detailed, chronologically exact fire-progression map developed to US Forest Service Standards by the Volunteer Wildfire Service's Planning Division, this limited edition is the only detailed case study of wildfire in the Western Cape written for a general audience. All profits from sales of The Cape Aflame – Cape Town's Dance with Fire go to essential-service, voluntary wildland fire-fighting and animal-welfare organisations.