At the scene of a forest fire
My previous blog entries were about the fire next door to our apartment in Ikuri and now I got to witness yet another fire. This took place on a smallish island in Näsijärvi lake near Murole. The weather has been very hot here in Finland for quite some time already so forest fires are pretty common place now. This fire probably started from a camp fire used to grill some sausages or something. The fire consumed about half hectare of undergrowth before it was stopped by the firefighters.
We were attending my wife's sister's kid's 2 year birthday party when couple of the persons present got a call about the fire. They are members of the local volunteer fire brigade (Vapaapalokunta (VPK) in finnish). An automated system calls the volunteers when there's a fire in their area. We decided to have quick look at what's going on so we took the boat to the island not too far from the hosts' house. There were already some firemen at the scene and some more arrived just as we got there. The fire didn't seem to big either so we decided to head back for the mainland. As we started back we then noticed some more flames on the other side of the island and decided to land and help the firemen.
So the volunteer firemen in our small group grabbed a hose and started to put down the fire with the others. The fire wasn't too big so stopping it didn't take too long but they had to really water down the ground which took a while. I wasn't equipped to help out so I just helped move the hoses a bit and took some photos of the event. You can now find the pictures in Flickr in the Forest Fire set.