Exactly one year on, the inferno that ravaged the Garden Route haunts those who faced the flames – but it has also galvanised a grieving mother to fight for measures to help prevent the kind of tragedy suffered by her family.
An anguished Theresa Doyle – mother of Bradley Richards, 24, the Plettenberg Bay fireman who perished after battling a massive blaze – has called for the law to be changed to ensure volunteer firefighters are properly trained and accredited.
Doyle said she recognised that the only positive thing she could do was look forward.
“What happened to my son cannot be undone,” she said.
“But I can fight to change things to prevent what happened to him happening to someone else.”
Doyle said the volunteer fire-fighting training problem was underpinned by the Further Education and Training Colleges Act, which at present made no stipulation for the sector.
“It allows for these volunteer units to operate simply on the experience passed down by the senior guys.

“It makes no stipulation that volunteer firefighters need to be trained and that the training must be accredited,” she said. This had to change, Doyle said. “It should be mandatory for all volunteer firefighters to be trained under a Sector Education and Training Authority-accredited course given by senior guys who have themselves already gone through a Seta-accredited course.”
Richards, it appears, was a meticulous and security-conscious young man, and although he was a relatively inexperienced firefighter, he had already put himself through two fire courses and a level-three first aid course.
However, when the Buffel fire truck he was riding on the back of careered into a 400m-long, 30m-high blaze in the early hours of the conflagration which swept KnysnaSedgefield-Plett on June 7, he was apparently wearing only his coveralls and not his heavy-duty protective bunker kit.
Severely burned, he died two days later. The reason he was not properly kitted up and exactly why the decision was taken to enter the forest without careful planning and back-up may never be known.
By all accounts, the circumstances were extraordinary.
It was menacingly hot and windy that day, at the tail-end of 18 months of below-average rainfall – and it was a day, senior Plett volunteer firefighter Steve Ritkey admitted grimly, “when so much went wrong”.
“Our communications broke down and, in the circumstances, the wrong call was made to go into the forest,” he said.
“Other questions should have been asked. We were inadequately set up.”
Ritkey – who is the spokesman for the Plett South Fire Management Unit (FMU) to which Richards belonged, and chairman of the new Bitou Association of Fire Management Association – said a new training regime had already been established in the wake of last year’s fires.
“The training was developed together with the Bitou Fire Department, drawing on experience gleaned from veteran bushfire crews in Cape Town as well as best practice established in the US.”
The biggest hurdle had been the limited time volunteers had available outside their full-time jobs, he said.
“But we have 40-plus volunteers presently enrolled on our Introduction to Wildland Fire-fighting course and, from now on, any person who wants to join one of our FMUs who does not want to do the course, will simply be asked to look elsewhere.”
The course included two sessions of three hours and six hours, respectively, to complete, Ritkey said. “The course is not Setaaccredited but it is modelled on a Seta course.“Seta accreditation is for professional firefighters and would require our volunteers to be weeks, if not months, off work. It’s just not practical.”
More than fighting fires, the main work of the units was managing the land to avoid fires – eradicating stands of alien trees, clearing felled brush and cutting firebreaks, he said.
“Landowners are obliged to clear their properties of invasive alien brush and the Bitou Municipality has drawn up a blacklist of landowners who aren’t abiding by this legislation. But measures need to be taken to enforce these efforts.”
Ritkey said the Bitou Fire Department, under whose command the Plett South FMU operated, had not called for the unit to deploy to the Harkerville Forest fire.
“It was a mundane hot spot check and we didn’t require direction from them. But then it went pear-shaped.”
Department of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries fire adviser Paul Gerber said accredited training should be mandatory for members of organisations established specifically to fight fires, like parastatal Working on Fire.
Members of groups like the FMUs should have to undergo basic training from a credible source, in terms of the Basic Health and Safety Act.
Gerber said it was accepted practice that volunteer firemen should not lead the way in a fire-fighting operation unless a life was in danger and immediate action was required.
It was also accepted practice that a fire should not be tackled head-on but rather from the flanks, and that at least two escape routes should be identified prior to tackling it.
Besides the necessity for training, the need for integrated fire control and defendable spaces cleared of alien invasives was key, and this was becoming increasingly important with climate change, he said.
Richards’ ashes are buried in an urn beneath a coral tree on his parents’ farm, Nyaminyami, on the Plett airport road.
Doyle said she had received hundreds of messages of condolence from her son’s friends echoing what she and Bradley’s stepfather, Norman, were feeling.
“He was a courageous and conscientious young man who was always smiling and we loved him very much.” NO ONE could have imagined that the fires which a year ago began nibbling at vegetation and plantations around Knysna – while concerning – would escalate so terrifyingly swiftly and leave such devastation in their path.
June 7 was the night the town burnt – and the memory of the sheer destruction and tragic loss of life, as well as that of the heroism of emergency workers, remains etched in the minds of all who experienced the inferno.
Flames would soon engulf surrounding areas and affect other towns – and there would be those who would put their lives on the line 24/7 as havoc reigned. But as we report today, a year on, huge lessons have been learnt.
And one of the voices to which particular attention should be paid is that of the mother of young Bradley Richards, who bravely set about doing his job as a volunteer firefighter as best he could, but who would pay the ultimate price.
The woeful reality, though, is that Theresa Doyle is adamant her son was insufficiently prepared for the task...