Something slightly different for this post: Back in early May this year, Crowthorne was enveloped in smoke from one of the biggest forest fires in the area for many years. Some people were evacuated from their homes on Brookers Row, businesses had to close, and roads were shut.
The village featured on local and national news reports covering a spate of forest fires around the UK. The Crowthorne fire was notable in that it was much closer to homes and businesses than usual fires in the area, and spread rapidly to cover a wide area. At its peak, there were more fire engines and personnel tackling the blaze than were deployed when Windsor Castle caught fire in the early 1990s, with crews coming in from surrounding counties to try to beat the blaze. To access enough water to tackle the fire, they pumped water from lakes at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, leading to huge hoses running through the woods. The bypass was closed for several days, with the top of Foresters Way becoming a makeshift fire-engine park.
The trees weren’t the only fuel for the fire: a lot of the ground in the area is peat, which can smoulder underground for some time and helped the fire continue for so long. The breeze also whipped up flames and spread the blaze. At one point, the fire got to within a couple of hundred yards of my office.
During the fire and immediate aftermath, I took some photos and a couple of video clips. There’s plenty of other photos and videos on Flickr and YouTube – it was quite an exciting thing to happen round here, so lots of people seemed to go out with their cameras.
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Six months on, they’ve bulldozed a lot of the scorched trees and cleared the ground so that they can plant new trees, including more fire-resistant varieties to help prevent something on this scale happening in future.
