NDRF, Uttarakhand forest dept teams work overnight to stop fire from engulfing fuel station

A team of 16 firefighters belonging to the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and officials in the Uttarakhand forest department worked for almost 10 hours on the intervening night of Wednesday and Thursday to douse the raging blaze in the hills of Varunavat in the state’s Uttarkashi town, and prevent them from engulfing the town’s lone fuel station among other key areas.

According to officials who were part of the operation, the fire, which erupted in the hills of Varunavat on Wednesday evening, spread and was just about 50-60 metres away from the fuel pump when it was doused off at around 6am on Thursday.

This came as the state continues to grapple with instances of forest fires, which has been the deadliest this year since 2021, when eight people died. However, the wildfire season is yet to reach the 2021 level for the area affected.

Five people have died in forest fires that have ravaged at least 1,196 ha of land in Uttarakhand since November last year. Overall, the hill state has witnessed 540 forest fires in the past one week.

Inspector Tirepan Rawat, who was part of the NDRF team that carried out the operation on the intervening night of Wednesday and Thursday, said: “At around 7pm on Wednesday, our control room received a distress call about a large fire on the hills of Varnavat forest. The flames were spreading rapidly. It was important for us to climb the hills to contain the situation as the blaze could have spread and reached the town’s sole fuel station, the district magistrate’s office and a nearby local market.”

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Rawat said climbing the hilly terrain was a challenge for the NDRF firefighters and officials of the state forest department. “Assisted by some forest department officials, our men climbed the hill in the dark. Teams were formed and they were assigned various tasks. While one team cleared the path of fire, another used fire beaters to douse the flames,” he said.

A third team, Rawat said, was tasked to create a firestop line in the forest to contain the blaze. Such a line is created by removing all the trees and bushes on a particular path to prevent the flames from spreading.

After the operation was called off at around 6am, when the fire was doused off, the team was sent to another hill in Vimleshwar, about 20km away from Uttarkashi, to take care of a similar situation, Rawat said. “The fire there was also brought under control,” he said on Thursday evening.

The 16 NDRF personnel are part of the agency’s 150-member forest firefighting team that was trained last year, officials said.

“The NDRF has been assigned a new task of handling forest fires… On account of a large number of forest fires ranging in different parts of Uttarakhand, teams have been deployed in Nainital, Pauri and Uttarkashi to provide assistance to state agencies in dousing the blaze and preventing them from reaching human habitats,” NDRF’s DIG (operations) Mohsen Shahedi said.