The Chapel Carn Brea wildfire and the help that turned up

The fire itself is not in the photograph. There is only the smoke, a wall of it lifting off the moor and turning orange where the light catches it, and one appliance parked out in the dry grass looking very small against all of it.

That was Wednesday afternoon above Chapel Carn Brea. What came afterwards took a good deal longer than the smoke did.

A large fire on open ground

St Just Community Fire Station was called to a large wildfire in the Chapel Carn Brea area that afternoon. It was not a job that finished when the flames went through. Crews stayed with it, and the fire was only extinguished after firefighters from a number of different stations had worked the ground alongside them.

📷Credit: St Just Community Fire Station

What the ground looks like after

The second photograph is the quieter one. An appliance on a dirt track, and beside it a slope burnt down to bare stalks and ash, fence posts still standing in the middle of it. In the foreground, thin smoke is still lifting out of the blackened gorse.

It is a useful picture, because it explains the length of the job better than any figure would. There is nothing to knock down and nothing to isolate. There is only a lot of ground, and someone has to walk all of it.

The teams that never make the photographs

Two of the thank-yous went to people who were not standing in a field at any point. St Just singled out Fire Control and the Workshops team, describing the support from both as vital. Neither tends to turn up in a picture of a fire, and both were named first.

📷Credit: St Just Community Fire Station

The farmers, the land owners and the refreshments

The rest of the thanks went outwards, past Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service entirely. Local farmers were named. So were land owners. And so were members of the public, who the station said had kindly donated refreshments while the work went on.

That last one is the detail worth sitting with. Somewhere between Wednesday afternoon and the end of it, a number of people in that corner of west Cornwall looked at the smoke over the hill, filled a flask, and drove out to a field to hand it over to strangers in fire kit.

There is a version of a story like this that is all appliance counts and hectares. This one is mostly a list of people to say thank you to.

What started the fire has not been said.

📷Credit: St Just Community Fire Station