News item, farmers cut firebreak and saved houses

All over the news for a few days now, a couple of young guys jumped into a tractor and mowed a firebreak to stop a fire in a barley field from spreading to houses in York until the fire brigade arrived, hailed as heroes and now invited to parliament for official recognition . . .

Good for them, but it's just what farmers do. My own son did exactly the same thing a few years ago when he was working for a local farmer, he heard the shout on his radio, he was a couple of fields away at the time, he arrived very quickly and cut a firebreak. Far from being praised, his boss complained that he had taken a shortcut to get to the fire quickly and had driven through 2 fences

You have to laugh about some "news" items . . .

I’ve watched the news regarding the fires in various parts of the country where water supplies are no easy or plentiful and wonder why they don’t try fire breaks, maybe I’m just looking at a simple action where the fire size makes it unworkable.

mj4456 said:

I’ve watched the news regarding the fires in various parts of the country where water supplies are no easy or plentiful and wonder why they don’t try fire breaks, maybe I’m just looking at a simple action where the fire size makes it unworkable.

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Farmers/farm workers always cut firebreaks, it's pretty well the only thing that works. But, there are 2 problems, sometimes 3.
1. It causes damage and crop losses, which is bad enough when someone does it on their own land, but fire knows no boundaries and people often have to cut firebreaks on neighbouring land too.
2. The damage then needs to be put right, if it's literally just a cultivator behind a tractor then it sort of sorts itself out, but there's never any time, in an emergency, to change an attachment and they have to go with what they have. If it's a drott with a bucket, or a front-loader tractor with a bucket, then the damage is greater and needs a lot of making good.
3. When it's in a National Park (and sadly it often is) then the national park tend to force the farmers to fill in the firebreaks far too quickly, at their own expense, adding to the risk of further fires. Unfortunately, National Parks are a blight on the working countryside.

The fire brigades are brilliant at putting out fires in cities but they just don't have the resources to deal with wildfires, their pumps only carry tiny amounts of water, there's often no air support immediately available and large bodies of water are often several miles away. If it wasn't for farmers there would, effectively, be no way of dealing with wildfires,

See this thread, https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/north-yorkshire-wildfire.769415/#post-9645476 where the fire brigade took all the credit but the farmers did all the work, for week after week, providing heavy machinery, their time and water, at their own cost.