Seven days a week, through the driest summer in Welsh records, a family run valleys business has been hauling water up the mountain and cutting firebreaks in support of the firefighters.
While South Wales Fire and Rescue Service has been fighting wildfire across South Wales, a small Aberdare based company has been quietly working alongside them, seven days a week, getting water to ground that no fire engine can reach.
Cwm Agricultural Ltd, a family run forestry and land management contractor founded in 2007, was called in by Natural Resources Wales to support the firefighting operation. Its crews have worked at Blaenllechau and Llanwonno, Gethin Forest, Blaenavon and at Penrhys fires.
The scale of what they were helping with is hard to overstate. Wales had roughly 8% of its normal July rainfall, the driest July since records began 190 years ago, and drought status was declared across the whole country. The fire above Ferndale and Blaenllechau grew to around 150 hectares within a day and drew 135 firefighters and 20 fire engines. At Blaenavon, another wildfire reached 220 hectares.
Cwm Agricultural put 3 tractors, 3 bowsers and up to 6 of its people onto the hills. Carrying well over 100,000 litres of water over the course of the past two weeks. Excavators were also in use to dig firebreaks, the stripped back lines of bare soil that give a running fire nothing left to burn.
Neil Maycock, Sales and Operations Manager at Cwm Agricultural, said:
“None of us went out looking for thanks. We had tankers, tractors and machines that reached ground that others couldn't and people willing to keep going while conditions kept changing. The firefighters and the Natural Resources Wales teams carried the risk. Our job was to keep the water coming and the breaks open. Everybody pulled together, and that is reason enough.”
Wildfires are still burning elsewhere in Wales, and Cwm Agricultural has kept its machines and its people available.
