Canterbury and Mid-South Canterbury districts will move to restricted fire seasons from 1am tomorrow until further notice, Fire and Emergency NZ announced this afternoon.
It comes after a series of large vegetation fires across the region in the past couple of weeks, including at Bridge Hill, West Melton and Kirwee.
Canterbury district commander Dave Stackhouse said the large fires in the last couple of weeks were a “serious indication” that outdoor fires need to be controlled.
“We’ve just had large wildfires at Castle Hill, West Melton and Kirwee, as well as other smaller fires which quickly escalated, like the ones at Hurunui and Dunsandel.”
He said the fire season had developed “earlier and more aggressively” and that the risk was elevating daily despite cooler and slightly wetter La Niña conditions being forecast.
“We need to impose restrictions on outdoor burning, as we’re expecting to see a lot of days over 25 degrees, and frequent winds above 25km/h.”
Mid-South Canterbury district commander Rob Hands said drought indicators were rising “very rapidly”.
“Any fire that starts is going to be difficult to knock down and control,” he said.
“It also takes us longer to fully extinguish all remaining hotspots after a fire, due to deep-seated burning.”
A fireworks ban was also planned for the Mid-South Canterbury area of the Mackenzie Basin and the area around Lake Clearwater and Lake Camp, he added.
‘Give the crews some respite’
Fire and Emergency also announced it would look to begin scaling down its response at the West Melton and Kirwee fires from tomorrow.
Incident commander Dave Key said today had been a “hard graft” with hand tools getting in amongst the trees and putting out hotspots.
“Tonight we will fly drones over both fires looking for hotspots and depending on the information that comes back we will probably look at reducing our crews tomorrow given the bulk of the work will be done by the end of today.”
Both sites would be assessed over the next two days with the hope they can be handed back to landowners.
Key thanked the firefighters who worked across both fires and urged the public to “give the crews some respite” after a busy seven days by being fire safe.
“I’m always proud of the way our firefighters keep turning up to fight these fires. Morale is still high among the crews, but of course everyone is getting a wee bit tired, so it would be good to have a break from fighting these fires.”
