And while there was no alien life, many would say that there should have been human life - in the form of forest officers cutting lines and burning the underbrush and leaf litter on a controlled basis before it came to this: a fire with no quick fix.
We asked the Chief Forest Officer about that:
Jules Vasquez, reporter
"How do you answer the criticism that this has happened because there is not regular maintenance of the bush by the Forestry Department. We know that historically how these situations are managed is that you burn lines in the forest to burn up all that underbrush which is the fuel for these large forest fires. But you all haven't done that, so what's burning now is all the fuel that has accumulated over many years."
Wilber Sabido, Chief Forest Officer
"The practice that you mentioned just now is one that is absolutely done in pine savannah and grassland areas. It is not a practice that is done in broad-leaf forest. The value of broad-leaf forest because of the sensitive nature of these ecosystems is that you would not want to introduce fire in them, because the value of these forest is in the leaf and organic matter - goes through the nutrient cycling that is important for biodiversity and for the maintenance of these sensitive ecosystems. If we would do burning for instance, we would expose the top soil and then you have the added risk of erosion and siltation into the waterways. So quite right, the practice that you mentioned is one that is done, but not within those types of ecosystems."
