Senior officials and field staff drawn from Bandipur, Mudumalai and Wayanad held a meeting to coordinate their activities to contain forest fire during the ensuing summer.
The inter-State coordination meeting was conducted at Bandipur on Monday and is reckoned to be an annual affair involving the staff of the three national parks and tiger reserves.
S.R. Natesh, Director, Bandipur Tiger Reserve, said that other issues related to joint patrolling to maintain an upper hand over potential poachers was also discussed though the thrust of the meeting was on coordinating their activities during an outbreak of fire during the forthcoming summer.
“We want to ensure that there is adequate communication and cooperation of staff from all the three forest areas to prevent the spread of fire from one region to another and prevent or to minimise the damage caused by fire,” said Mr. Natesh.
While the issue of forest fire preparedness dominated the meeting, there was also thrust on the imperatives of intelligence sharing and joint patrolling, weed eradication etc. This was followed by a demonstration by fire services personnel on forest fire control. Karnataka shares about 210 km of forest boundary with both Tamil Nadu and Kerala, according to Mr. Natesh and coordination was imperative to deal with both forest fires and the menace of poachers.
The meeting is reckoned to be significant as all the three forests Bandipur, Mudumalai and Wayanad – have a history of forest fires that tend to break out with unceasing regularity during summer. Wet weather due to depression and cyclone in the Bay of Bengal during late November and early December is expected to ward off the onset of the fire season by a few days. But the authorities say the nature of the forest being dry deciduous the vegetation is expected to go dry soon and hence they have to be cautious about any outbreak of fire.
Meanwhile, preparedness by way of clearing the vegetation and their controlled burning along the demarcated areas – fire lines – and which act as “fire breaks”, is expected to be completed by the end of this month. Bandipur has a fire line of 2,828 km and this is critical in ensuring that a fire outbreak in one part of the forest does not spread to another region.
In 2019, a major fire spread over a few days devastated nearly 15,000 acres of forest in Bandipur. This was attributed to lack of fire fighting preparedness.
