Danny Wadman drove his digger into a Mawgan Porth wildfire

A tractor working a field above Mawgan Porth threw a spark. Within minutes a stiff wind had turned it into a wall of flame racing towards a wooded valley, a run of isolated houses, three campsites and a string of holiday cottages. Fire crews moved in. So did a 28 year old groundworks contractor in a digger, and he had no intention of stopping.

📷Credit: Robert Buchanan Taylor

Into the flames when everyone else pulled back

Danny Wadman knows the ground high above Mawgan Porth better than most. He is a third-generation local, and his own groundworks business carries a name nobody at the scene could quite get past on the day: Inferno Groundworks.

Fire officers advised him to stay back. Danny weighed up the risk and decided it was worth taking, then drove his digger straight towards the advancing fire. For two hours he cut fire breaks ahead of the flames, some running over a hundred metres, trying to stop the blaze reaching the wooded valley and the properties below it. His machine was often completely engulfed in fire as he worked.

The digger that didn’t make it out

The heat did not spare the machine. Danny’s cab window shattered, then his rear window blew out too. The engine temperature gauge went off the dial, and the diesel engine itself began making noises he describes as gruesome. His hydraulic hoses melted, taking the hydraulics with them. The brakes started to fail. Then the steering went. Both front tyres exploded, and the extreme heat affected the pins holding the front bucket in place until it detached completely.

Two firefighters stayed close throughout, doing what they could to keep him from catching fire himself, “patting him down” as Danny puts it. By the time the flames were beaten back, the isolated houses, the three campsites and the holiday cottages in the fire’s path had all been saved.

Danny lives to fight another day. The digger does not. It is the same machine he bought and then drove for 13 hours from Sussex to Mawgan Porth, and it has now been written off completely.

Now it’s the county’s turn to help

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help Danny replace the digger he lost saving the valley, with every donation going directly towards a replacement machine. As the fundraiser puts it, Danny put his own livelihood on the line to keep everyone safe, and now it’s the county’s turn to back him.

📷Credit: Robert Buchanan Taylor