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LOCALS IN GLENCULLEN are calling for the establishment of a new taskforce to oversee how wildfires are tackled as they have been left “terrified” by ongoing blazes close to people’s homes.
A local councillor in the area, Michael Fleming, said that volunteers from around the Dublin mountains area assisted Dublin Fire Brigade in battling the fires since they first broke out, and again yesterday and throughout today after they reignited.
He said that now the fire brigade, the Office of Public Works and Coillte, the State-owned forestry company, need to come together in the form of a taskforce aimed at coordinating how agencies respond to wildfires.
“We had seventy men out here on Friday evening for hours, helping firefighters move water hoses, working to put out flames with shovels, and that joint response meant that the flames did not reach anyone’s houses. However, there were around eight different homes that were really nearby the flames, and that posed a significant risk to those people,” he said.
Fleming added that high winds saw reignited fires being blown towards the forest.
“If it had spread there and beyond, hundreds more people would have been put at risk. We know that the weather is going to be getting hotter and hotter each year, and so now we need a more proactive response to this, because this was terrifying for people, and the smoke has been horrendous,” he said.
Fleming said that “joined up thinking” is needed now.
“There’s people’s lives at risk here. There’s people’s livelihoods at risk,” he said.
Antoinette Pim is in her 60s, she lives in the area with her mother, who is in her 90s.
She said that her mother was so afraid of the fire over the weekend that she had packed her passport and her will into a bag and put it into the car in case the two women needed to escape.
“That was the terror of it, we have neighbours who were evacuated, and that woman was in an awful state too. Even on Sunday night we did think that was it, we went to sleep, and then I got a call very early to ask if I’d looked out of the window, and it had started again,” she said.
Pim said that a management plan for the area is needed to ensure that blazes can be prevented and tackled quickly in the future.
“No one is taking ownership of this. I don’t know which agencies are involved, I know that there are people who have land rights to different areas of the hill. Everyone needs to come together to sort this out because otherwise there could be a fatality in the future,” she said.
Darren O’Connor, district officer with the Dublin Fire Brigade, this morning said that a change in wind direction yesterday brought the fire uphill and caused it to spread further.
“It’s not right for people to be terrified in their homes, the destruction to the land is horrendous, and as well as that, there’s a huge cost to fighting these fires, helicopters have been overhead on and off today, and that is seriously costly,” he said.
He added that it is not clear how the fire started.
“We don’t have an exact cause of it, but they generally start near pathways and roadways, but it’s impossible at this stage to say what the source of this ignition was,” he said on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.
He added that this summer has been particularly busy for firefighters as the weather has led to a number of wildfire outbreaks, and that hot conditions have been difficult for firefighters to work in.
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