Fires flare in Dome bush and barn

Fire crews from Wellsford had a busy day on March 3 when a fire started in a pine forest, near Waitairare Creek in The Dome.

Fire chief Jim Bowmar says recent rain helped avert a major disaster.

“It’s our worse nightmare,” he says. “The fire was at the bottom of a slope of mature pine trees. If we hadn’t had the recent rain, we could have been in real trouble.”

As it was, fire crews from Wellsford and Warkworth soon had the blaze under control, assisted by a water tanker from Mahurangi.

The cause of the fire is being determined, but Northpower linesmen were in the area in the morning and there were power outages in both Warkworth and Wellsford when the fire was alight.

The Wellsford crew attended training that night, only to return home for an hour or two before a second alarm was raised. This time it was a hay barn fire, just south of the Hoteo Bridge, on SH16. The Ahuroa unit was first on the scene. Two crews attended from Wellsford, as well as water tankers from Puhoi and Silverdale. The barn was destroyed in the blaze and the last crew left around daybreak.

“Two barns, a bit further south, burned down last year and the latest fire was in a barn that had been the target of taggers. We’re a bit suspicious that the fire may have been deliberately lit.”