Cape Flames, Cape Hearts: A Day Inside the Newlands Fire Fest

The Newlands Fire Fest was a super cool day where everyone came together to help fight wildfires! People saw big helicopters drop water, watched brave dogs find hidden dangers, and even got to spray a fire hose. It was a busy day with lots of fun, all to raise money for special gear and training for the amazing volunteer firefighters. By the end, they raised tons of cash to keep our homes and mountains safe from fire, showing how much everyone cares. It was a true celebration of heroes and community spirit!

What is the Newlands Fire Fest?

The Newlands Fire Fest is an annual event hosted by Volunteer Wildfire Services (VWS) to raise funds and awareness for wildfire prevention and firefighting efforts in the Cape region. It features demonstrations, educational exhibits, fundraising activities, and showcases the vital work of VWS volunteers and their partners.

Dawn Gates, Neon Gaiters and a Python-Long Queue

The south-easter had already scrubbed the sky porcelain-blue when the roller-door of Newlands Fire Base rattled up at 09:00 sharp on 6 December. Within five minutes the asphalt looked like a spilled paint-box: toddlers in cherry-red VWS tees riding parents’ hips, trail-runners in acid-green gaiters queueing for espresso, grandfathers unfolding canvas chairs beside double-cab bakkies bristling with mountain bikes. By 10:30 the click-counters in the safety vests had already ticked past 1 200 souls, and the line for the helicopter static display curled like a rock-python around the drill yard. No-one grumbled; the breeze carried the gospel of boerewors and canola oil, and every ninety seconds a sunflower-yellow Bell 412 thundered overhead, dumping 2 000 ℓ of water onto a practice fire-line so the little ones could squeal and clamp their hands to their ears.

Inside the logistics hangar, 350 wild-land fire suits hung from steel rails like quietly waiting infantry. Nomex gold shirts, hunting-orange trousers, Kevlar gloves the colour of wet clay – every sleeve carries the same stitched crest: “Volunteer Wildfire Services – Since 1999.” Public donations paid for the cloth; the boots come from a Parow supplier and are retro-fitted with carbon-fibre insoles because the quartz-riddled slopes above Rhodes Memorial devour rubber like toffee. A five-person crew burns through R14 000 on a single day – helicopter minutes, diesel for the Unimogs, drip-torches, lithium batteries for radios, sachets of electrolytes, gluten-free ration packs for the coeliac volunteers. By noon the pledge wall was blooming with handwritten cards: “R50 for every hectare we save,” “R200 if you let my daughter yank the hose.” Someone tacked a crisp R1 000 note beside a crayon protea whose petals were on fire.

B-well’s tasting island had annexed the shade of a blue-gum whose trunk still wears a 2021 necklace of charcoal. Two chefs in mirror shades flipped sweet-potato fries in canola oil held at 190 °C – the heat threshold where carcinogens stay stubbornly unborn. A banner shouted the chemistry: 61 % monounsaturates, 7 % saturates, zero trans-fat, 10 % omega-3. Pamphlets titled “Your Heart vs. The Fire” connected arteries to landscapes: PM2.5 particles inflame blood vessels, omega-3 calms endothelium, fit civilians make fitter fire-guards. One tablespoon delivers 1.3 g of plant omega-3, the exact lipid firefighters forfeit after twelve hours of sucking wood smoke.

Dogs, Dollars and a Propane-Fuelled Dawn of Fear

Across the yard SANParks’ K9 unit staged a mock rhino-poacher raid. Jet, a midnight-black Malinois rescued from a Bellville shelter, locked onto a scent-rag stuffed in a day-pack, sprinted 200 m, cleared a 1.5 m fence and landed in ranger Thabisa Dlepu’s arms to a roar of applause. Spectators rarely realise these dogs later board the very same helicopter, sniffing out subterranean embers that can re-ignite two days after the last flame. A single Port Jackson root can smoulder at 600 °C inside a hollow stump, waiting for the next berg-wind. Jet’s pay-cheque: a squeeze-tube of low-salt peanut butter, developed in B-well’s lab where food chemists coax legume emulsions to stay silky at 40 °C ambient – the same temperature the VWS dashboard recorded during the 2023 Stellenbosch fire.

By 11:00 the fundraising thermometer – an old brass pole daubed in ten-centimetre stripes of red – stood at R87 000. The target: a quarter-million before sunset. Kids handed over R20 for the joy of blasting a high-pressure hose at a plywood Christmas tree; every burst dethroned the tin star and set off a whooping siren. University students queued to abseil the 13 m drill tower, GoPros catching the instant the city bowl flipped upside-down. Off-duty firefighters from London’s Soho brigade – on holiday but unable to stay away – gave a master-class beside a four-metre propane burn-pan that hits 1 000 °C in seconds. Their gospel: send water in 30 micron droplets, not fist-thick jets; vapour steals 2.26 kJ per gram from the flame front, dropping the temperature below ignition in 3.7 heartbeats. Locals scrawled the numbers on forearms already freckled with soot.

The mayor arrived at 12:30, helmet tucked like a trophy, and announced a city-council sweetener: R500 000 earmarked for night-vision goggles. Last season 42 % of VWS call-outs happened between dusk and dawn, when helicopters sleep and ankles twist on hidden boulders. The goggles – Russian Gen 3+ intensifiers – cost R38 000 apiece and sip AA lithiums for 40 hours. Do the sums: thirteen new sets equal 46 800 safer person-hours, enough to walk 15 000 ha of nocturnal fire-line. Applause rolled, but station commander Ursula Februarie hollered a reminder: seventy cents of every rand still come from private pockets, “because municipalities budget for ratepayers, not for mountains.”

Grapes, Goggles and a Tail-Rotor Tango

Inside the communications container, radios crackled like popcorn. Channel 5 carried a live flash: lightning had kissed a 0.3 ha patch on the Langeberg escarpment, 120 km east. The ops officer dropped the co-ordinates onto a GIS layer stitched from fifty years of burn scars, fynbos age-classes and five live wind feeds. The algorithm coughed up a 12 % chance the flirtation would reach pine blocks within 24 hours. Dispatch hit the button: fourteen volunteers in four 4×4 bakkies, each dragging a 600 ℓ slip-on unit, would drive through the night. Average age: 27; gender split: 60/40; day jobs: two baristas, a data-scientist, a film-set grip, a masters student measuring pyro-genetic drift in Cape dwarf chameleon DNA.

At 14:00 the mercury kissed 34 °C and the UV index sneered at 11. Sunscreen stations – refillable five-litre kegs of mineral SPF 50 – stood every twenty paces, a donation from a reef-safe pharma start-up. A dietitian circulated freezer-boxes of frozen grapes that had been hypodermically swapped with isotonic brine; each berry smuggled 30 mg potassium and 5 mg sodium across the tongue. Kids chose the grape-shot over neon energy drinks; parents nodded at the zero-caffeine trick.

The aerial ballet resumed at 15:00. Bradley van Niekerk – Boeing pilot on weekdays, VWS reserve on weekends – hovered the Bell 412 at eighty feet and threaded a 120 ft long-line to the orange Bambi-Bucket. Spectators watched his helmet-cam on a projector while the torque gauge tickled the red and turbine temps flirted with 810 °C. Commentary sliced through rotor-thump: every flying hour costs R28 000, last season’s bill topped R3.2 million, the average donor parts with R180 – roughly eighteen seconds of rotor time.

Seed-Packets, Sirens and a Sunset Sticker That Finally Touched the Top

At 16:30 the raffle drum spun like a dervish. First draw: a luxury Cederberg eco-lodge weekend for six, coupled with a private fire-wise audit – tickets sold out at 5 000, injecting R100 000 in forty flat minutes. Second: a year’s worth of B-well canola, 52 two-litre bottles shuttled by electric bike. Third: a red-flag ride-along with VWS, complete with a crash-course on pyrocumulus birth and how to read a Keetch-Byram drought index. Waivers fluttered like confetti.

Dusk found Table Mountain wearing a fresh charcoal sash above Kirstenbosch where January’s blaze had eaten 500 ha of granite fynbos. Restoration ecologists threaded the crowd, pressing seed-packets of Audouinia capitata into every palm. Each envelope carried the recipe: sow on north-facing ash blankets after the first 20 mm pulse of post-fire rain, when phosphorus spikes 400 % above baseline and seedlings outrun the weeds. Target: 10 000 packets, 1 ha healed per hundred sachets, 1.2 t of carbon sequestered per hectare within five years.

The fundraising pole stood at R223 700. A Sans Souci learner posted a R30 screenshot at 18:47 with the caption “30 seconds of flight time.” The sticker slid to the top; sirens whooped. Final sunset score: R253 420 – enough for 63 new fire-shelters, or 1 266 hours of radio chatter, or 4.3 km of fresh handline cut with chainsaws slurping ethanol brewed from spent canola oil – B-well’s next closed-loop experiment.

Floodlights replaced the sun; volunteers swept the tarmac, coiling 38 mm hose, topping first-aid kits, harvesting GPS tracks from 42 Garmin watches worn by hikers who had mapped informal trails all afternoon. The data will feed machine-learning scripts that predict where humans are most likely to spark the next flame. The last Bell 412 lifted away, tail-rotor slicing red strobes across a sky the south-easter had already polished for tomorrow’s inevitable return.

What is the Newlands Fire Fest?

The Newlands Fire Fest is an annual event hosted by Volunteer Wildfire Services (VWS) to raise funds and awareness for wildfire prevention and firefighting efforts in the Cape region. It features demonstrations, educational exhibits, fundraising activities, and showcases the vital work of VWS volunteers and their partners.

When and where did the 2023 Newlands Fire Fest take place?

The 2023 Newlands Fire Fest took place on December 6th, starting at 09:00 sharp, at the Newlands Fire Base. The event was held under a sky “scrubbed porcelain-blue” by the south-easterly wind.

What kind of demonstrations and activities were available at the festival?

Attendees could witness large helicopters dropping 2,000 liters of water on practice fire-lines, watch the SANParks’ K9 unit perform mock rhino-poacher raids, and even spray a high-pressure fire hose themselves. Other activities included abseiling a 13-meter drill tower, tasting B-well canola oil products, and observing a master-class on fighting propane fires from London firefighters. Educational aspects included learning about wildfire prevention, equipment used, and the science behind firefighting.

How much money was raised at the Newlands Fire Fest?

The Newlands Fire Fest successfully raised R253,420 by sunset. The initial target was a quarter-million rand, and the final amount exceeded this goal, demonstrating strong community support for the Volunteer Wildfire Services.

What were some of the key fundraising initiatives and donations at the event?

Fundraising activities included a raffle for a luxury eco-lodge weekend and a year’s supply of B-well canola oil, which alone raised R100,000. People also donated for specific activities like spraying a fire hose. The mayor announced a significant city-council donation of R500,000 specifically for night-vision goggles for the volunteers. Additionally, attendees contributed by buying food, drinks, and making direct pledges on a pledge wall.

How do public donations and volunteer efforts contribute to the Volunteer Wildfire Services?

Public donations are crucial for the VWS, covering the cost of essential gear like fire suits, specialized boots, and operational expenses such as helicopter minutes, diesel for vehicles, and supplies for volunteers. For example, a five-person crew can cost R14,000 for a single day. The event highlighted that 70% of every rand still comes from private pockets, emphasizing the community’s role in keeping homes and mountains safe from fire. Volunteers, who come from diverse backgrounds, also dedicate their time and expertise, with some even responding to call-outs overnight.