Cape Town - The use of drone technology has greatly enhanced and supplemented fire management at Table Mountain National Park (TMNP).
SANParks demonstrated the thermal drone technology, operated by Enviro Wildfire Consultancy, at its Newlands Fire Base, on Thursday.
The day also marked a year since the Castle Rock wildfire on December 19, 2023.
Due to the strong southeasterly, the vegetation fire quickly spread up the slopes above Castle Rock burning 3 500 hectares and vegetation which has not burned in more than 30 years.
Founder of Enviro Wildfire Consultancy, Rob Erasmus, said the authorised drones allow for information to be gathered and interpreted, providing visuals through the smoke, so as to see how and where best to respond, effectively reducing costs and time taken to put out the fires.
“And the drones are able to fly the parameter of the fire very quickly… And we’re able to pick up really small smouldering embers that the human eye cannot see. Once we’ve got those locations, we download the information, send it through to the fire managers, and they then send out the teams to dig them up and put the fires out. So it's a really big cost saving. It's very disheartening when you’ve spent a lot of time putting the fire out, and then it starts up again,” Erasmus said.
TMNP fire manager, Justin Buchmann, said the drones were new technology tested out over several fire seasons.
“As helicopters can't fly at night, we can put drones up and quite often that helps us deploy staff and particular ground resources in remote areas where we can’t necessarily get to, easily.”
Since April this year, there have been 68 fires, twice the number of fires seen during the same period last year.
Saturdays have been identified as fire risk days.
Buchmann said the greatest area of concern is the City Bowl area.
He added that when vagrants were removed from an area in the City Bowl and further displaced and moved to the mountain, fires were noticeable, indicating a direct link between the two.
TMNP park manager, Megan Taplin, said a project will start next year to investigate and study the various uses for the park and would guide SANParks on how to better manage these activities.
The public has been requested to provide a pin location and image of fire when reporting a fire to Emergency Number 086 110 6417, to assist in finding the location faster and make certain assessments based on the images.
shakirah.thebus@inl.co.za