16 Mar 2010
A fire in Wenita's Mt Allan forestry block, northwest of Dunedin, is expected to be the most expensive of its kind in the country, says national rural fire officer Murray Dudfield in the Otago Daily Times.
In Dunedin yesterday with internal affairs minister Nathan Guy, he said the bill for containing and cleaning up Mt Allan was likely to exceed $1 million. The fire, which consumed more than 800ha of forest and cut-over land, is contained, but still not out, three weeks after it started.
Mr Guy, whose responsibilities include fire legislation, said he was impressed with the effort that had been put into controlling the Mt Allan fire, one of several fire sites he has visited in his role as Internal Affairs Minister to see what lessons could be learned from them.
Wenita chief executive Dave Cormack, who accompanied Mr Guy in a 30-minute flight over the fire site, said up to 30 Wenita staff were still working on the fire site dampening down hot spots in tree waste piles and tree stumps and salvaging damaged trees.
Mr Dudfield said while it was not the biggest fire in New Zealand, it was the first time one of the country's three national incident management teams had been deployed in New Zealand in recent years.
Source: Abstracted from an ODT story by Debbie Porteous, Tuesday 16 March 2010
