Even allowing for dropped cigarette butts, 70 fires in Co Donegal in one day is a lot. So what, or who, is behind the fires that cost us €5 million this week?

IN THE 24 hours between Monday and Tuesday morning this week, Donegal’s fire service received more than 300 calls alerting it to blazes. Firefighters were sent to incidents at about 70 locations across the county. They had already been on call since last Saturday, when the first of the most widespread and persistent fires had begun to spread in Co Donegal, possibly the county worst affected by the wildfires of the past week. Coillte estimates that the fires across the country have cost the State €5 million.

“It’s the most intense series of fires I’ve ever seen,” says Bobby McMenamin, Donegal’s chief fire officer, who has been with the service since 1973. He described Sunday’s fires as the worst in living memory. There have also been serious gorse fires in Offaly, Mayo, Meath and elsewhere. One of the areas affected last weekend in Donegal was a few kilometres outside Ballyshannon, in the townland of Doobally.

Kevin Quinn, who lives nearby, and who helped man a closed-off crossroads last Sunday, describes it as the length of two football pitches. In addition to the fire service, here, as in many other places, locals rushed to help avert the fire by supplying tractors and slurry tankers that could be filled with water.

Even so, there was damage. Quinn reports that one of his neighbours had more than 6km of wooden fencing burned in the fire. Far worse, the wooden home of Ursula Stein, a woman in her 80s, was destroyed. Taken in by neighbours before the flames reached her, she is still in their care and is understandably distraught.

Three days after her house burned down, the place is still smouldering. The only intact sign of recent habitation is, ironically, a metal fireguard placed carefully in front of the fireplace. The chimney is the sole part of the structure still standing. A disturbing mosaic of broken china, twisted metal and glass now floors the ruined interior. In one corner are the remains of an old Singer sewing machine. In another, preserving jars from pantry shelves have exploded. To one side of the house a neatly tended garden still blooms.

The woman’s immediate neighbours, dairy farmers Gabriel and Anne Fee, arrived home from Mass on Saturday evening to find three fire trucks in their front yard. “We were up till three or four in the morning, helping,” Gabriel says, still shaken. They alerted the services to a nearby holiday house with a thatched roof. It was duly doused and remained undamaged.

Over the past week there have been fires in Dungloe, extending over 25sq km; at Portnoo, Glenties, Malin Head; on Muckish Mountain; near Ballyshannon; and at numerous other locations. Resources have been pushed to the limit. There are 146 firemen stationed across Co Donegal, and this week 120 have been fighting the blazes, with the remainder on standby.

By Wednesday the crew based at Glenties fire station had spent so much time battling the fires that when you walked into the station the acrid smell of smoke from their clothes was the first thing to hit you. Every one of them looked exhausted as they prepared to leave to extinguish yet another fire.

In the station’s office a whiteboard propped on a chair tells the story of the previous 24 hours, with a hand-drawn map of Bonny Glen Wood. At 7.35pm the previous evening the wind had been blowing in a northwesterly direction. Red and green markers indicated where the fire was, where it was spreading to, the dozen houses that had to be evacuated and the position of the available resources.

“We thought we had it contained,” says the assistant chief fire officer, Glenn Hamilton. “But it jumped and went into the forestry plantation. The amount of smoke you get from burning evergreens is something else.” Fire, he says, travels fastest when it goes over ungrazed land, because it gathers momentum from the amount of substance it’s burning, so preheating the ground ahead of it. In three minutes they watched fire travel over 800m to Bonny Glen Wood. “There is so much heat in that situation: you can’t put men in there, even with breathing apparatus,” Hamilton says. “Bonny Glen is a big brute of a plantation. And half of it was burned. It’s still burning.”

There is the additional problem that the severe winter killed shrubs and other vegetation. Once the fire hit, the dead material became a mass of kindling. And the recent long dry spell, followed by wind, helped spread the flames.

The houses that were evacuated had fire heading for their gardens. “Lives first, property second,” says the station officer, Hugh Doherty. “The only way you can save property is to douse it, and douse the surrounding outside. But you need to do it when the flames are almost right at the house. Otherwise it’s too early.” It’s an extremely dangerous job that has to be done with breathing apparatus.

SO WHERE DID the fires come from? Even allowing for accidentally dropped cigarette butts, or carelessly left picnic fires, blazes at 70 locations in one county in 24 hours is a lot of fires. What has been causing them? Nobody in Donegal answers that question with the loaded word arson. What they say is “lit”.

“Two days previously there were fires started off the main Ardara-Glenties road,” Doherty says. “It’s strange they were started when it was known there were no brigades in the area, because we had been called away to Dungloe.” He laughs. “On Saturday night there were one, two, three, four, five fires started on Doochary side. Those fires didn’t start on their own in the middle of the night. They were lit.”

Tony Finnerty is the Coillte forest manager responsible for Bonny Glen Wood, which is planted with Sitka spruce, pine and Japanese larch, and for a large area of forestry in west Donegal. When I call him he apologises for sounding as if he is not making a lot of sense. “I haven’t slept more than a few hours in five nights.” He gives me directions to Bonny Glen, near Portnoo. Driving there, the smell of burning gets stronger. Even though the windows of the car are closed it burrows inside.

The smoke from Bonny Glen Wood and its surroundings is evident long before you get there and see blackened landscape stretching out for kilometres.

En route, cars are parked along the verge, their occupants watching three helicopters dropping water on the fires from the nearby lake, slightly stunned expressions on their faces. The helicopters carry Bambi Buckets, which hold 1,200l of water. Even so, from the ground the buckets look no larger or more effective at dousing a fire than thimbles. The helicopters have already been flying for six hours.

Finnerty is directing manpower, and eating a day-old egg-and-bacon sandwich, when I arrive. He too looks grey with tiredness. He still does not know how much of this wood has been destroyed, but he estimates it as upwards of 400 hectares. “It’s catastrophic. That’s all I can say. The taxpayer is the real loser here. Those trees were coming on maturity, after being planted 28 years ago.”

The week before the fires started, steel barriers in the wood were tampered with. “They can only have been removed by using a heavy-duty vehicle like a digger,” he says, pointing out a similar one below us. “It’s only my personal opinion, but I don’t know why some people do these things. Someone decided they didn’t like our forests, and they started those fires. They were lit.”

“I’m sure there was more than picnic fires lit,” Bobby McMenamin, the county’s chief fire officer, says. “There were five fires in Buncrana in one day, so it’s obvious someone was doing something they shouldn’t be doing. And in Dungloe, on Saturday evening, we had put a fire out by 5pm. Two other fires started up again there at 5am. At five in the morning fires just don’t happen by themselves.”

At Ardara, where the smell of smoke still prevails, the fires are the talk of the newsagent’s. “God help those people if we catch them,” the assistant, who does not want to be named, says. “The damage they have caused, and the threat to lives and property, is terrible.”

She does not believe it was accidental. “If it was dropped cigarettes that caused fires, why didn’t the people who dropped them call the authorities immediately?”