91Èȱ¬

Beating out the scourge of deliberate grass fires that blighted large swathes of Wales over the recent Easter holidays will take years, if not decades, according to a senior fire officer.

While taking encouragement from the performance of campaigns to reduce the 7,000 such fires a year in Wales, South Wales Fire and Rescue Service's Dave Ansell believes such efforts will need to be sustained over a long period.

From his position within his brigade's community safety and partnerships department, he sees parallels between the work he's overseeing to prevent grass fires in the first place and earlier campaigns to tackle drink-driving.

"Forty or fifty years ago it was almost acceptable and allowed and people did drink and drive. By changing the law, by using marketing and the media it's totally socially unacceptable to drink and drive these days."

"I think it's exactly the same way forward with the grass fires. We have to change people's attitudes, we have to change their behaviour. That can only be done over a period of time."

South Wales has long been a hotspot for deliberate grass fires. Research conducted in 2009 calculated that such incidents cost the service £7 million a year - one fifth of the total for the whole of the United Kingdom.

The Rhondda Cynon Taf area on its own accounted for 10 per cent of the national total.

Station manager Dave Ansell believes that those figures suggest that in some areas setting grass fires is almost socially acceptable. "Tom Jones made a song very famous once - The Green Green Grass of 91Èȱ¬."

"I speak to a lot of people who are very proud to be Welsh and proud to be from the Valleys and yet they're quite happy, or appear to be quite happy, to allow their mountains to burn."

"People need to realise that this isn't risk-free naughtiness, that it is affecting somebody, that it is affecting the places they live, that it's affecting bringing tourism and industry into the area."