We had a little muirburn went wrong a week ago here. Luckily I got a good view (it was the other side of the glen) Spring tends to be our time for wildfires as summer is our rainy season. In the spring there is a lot of dead vegetation from the previous year and little new growth. Also the crofters set fire to the heather to clear the way for grass growth in spring. Technically this shouldn't have happened as warnings had gone out that the weather was unusually dry. Here we'd only had a week without rain, so I think that was unfair, I don't really know enough to comment though.
Anyway the burn started quite small with a light wind from the Sorth and started to spread.
muirburn day 1
Our local brigade takes about 20 minutes to get here. They appeared to use the first day keeping an eye on the fire and damping down around the reservoir buildings which are roughly in the middle of that conflagration. The fire slowly spread in all directions with big flames at times and sometimes just a lot of smoke. As far as I could see they were mostly just watching and damping down.
The following day the wind direction changed and, although the wind was now away from the houses, the strength was a little higher and the fire was still spreading to the North. To the South the smoke was so thick you couldn't see how intense the fire was. We actually had half the Highland fire brigades here to deal with it.
Muirburn day 2
What I noticed was that the fire was no longer a complete circumference, but had formed separate fronts and the fire service were able to deal with them as separate fires rather than having a whole front to try and deal with. There is fire at the left of this picture and another where there is a step on the lower edge above the gap in the trees. They were concentrating their efforts on the boundary close to the houses at this point as it was slowly spreading down the hill, using the water they could access from the mains to damp it down. Later they got up on the hill and beat the whole lot out, so the sky was clear the third day. The fire fighters did a spendid job and we felt a bit helpless to know what to do to help - refreshments were provided....
It occurs to me that this was a nice example of observation, and letting the fire deal with itself, rather than intervening and wearing themselves out fighting nature. Obviously you don't always have the luxury of allowing the fire to burn itself out, but the change in wind direction meant that the fire was trying to burn at this end mostly over the area it had already burnt so a lot of it just stopped of it's own accord.
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