Throughout history, fires have caused widespread devastation and loss. In late September 2023, the NCT Forestry Co-operative Limited (NCT) mill in Richards Bay experienced this firsthand when strong winds, low humidity, and high temperatures combined to create ideal conditions for a fire that raged for more than ten days.

The community and industry rallied immediately, with assistance provided by, among others, uMhlathuze Municipality, Transnet, Mondi, South32, Sappi, the Zululand and KwaZulu-Natal Fire Protection Associations (FPA), helicopters from Working on Fire, Leomat Construction, and Bell Equipment, which sent two 38,000 litre Bell Water Tankers.

“We thank our Bell Sales Representative, Haig Thompson, and the Bell team for those Bell Water Tankers. They made a huge difference. In fact, we’ve planned our new fire reticulation system based on the volume of water that those two machines threw”, says Ryno Martyn, NCT Operations Manager, Richards Bay.

Dr Antonio Ciolli, who holds a PhD in fire engineering, has taken NCT’s fire preparedness to the next level with a new fire plan. In the event of a fire, based on NCT’s fuel loads, the plant needs to be able to deliver 7,400 litres of water per minute for six hours without relying on the municipal water supply. “That’s just under 2,5 million litres of water that we need to keep on the front at any one stage”, explains Ryno.

To achieve this, NCT Richards Bay now has its own fire station and has installed a 200mm ring main pipeline around the property, with pumps and a pump station capable of delivering around 9 bar pressure.

“We can release the same amount of water as the Bell water tankers using water cannons fixed to a Toyota Land Cruiser that can go anywhere. The water cannons discharge over 7,500 litres of water per minute and can reach up to 70 metres. These ideas came from lessons learned during the fire, making the new system more practical and effective”.

Destruction

From a business perspective, Ryno recalls: “The worst part about the fire was that the market had just started to come right and we had increased our chipping rate. Then, suddenly, the Chinese market dipped, and they decided to slow everything down. They didn’t cancel vessels, but by slowing everything down, we started to build up stock. That morning at 4am, we had just finished loading the first of four vessels due to arrive over the next two weeks. We had the fire that afternoon and had to turn the other three vessels away. That was terrible”.

Recovery

Due to the investigations and the December holiday season, NCT only really got going in January 2024. Ryno said: “In January, I met with a company in Worcester, Western Cape that produces biofuel products. We realised that they couldn’t produce a paper-quality chip, but we could certainly produce a biofuel-quality chip, so we hired the company to come and chip for us from February 2024.

“We’ve got two long-standing contracts with Japan for biofuel products, so this was at least something that we could help our customers with, because it’s important to remember that we’re a co-operative and a priority for us is to help keep our timber farmers turning over some timber. When we first started, we were only going to process about 75,000 tonnes, but by the time the machine left in June 2025, we’d done about 230,000 tonnes, and had loaded five vessels”.

The two chipping plants – Bay Fibre and Richards Bay Wood Chips (RBWC) – had to be rebuilt from scratch. BayFibre, which chips predominantly wattle, was chipping as a going concern by November 2024, and by June 2025, the two plants were chipping a combined volume of 3,000 t of timber per day, just shy of the 4,000 tonnes per day they were chipping before the fire.