5.15pm on Sunday<\/a>.<\/p>\nFive ground crews are working to prevent the fire from spreading further, and are being supported by seven helicopters along with heavy machinery.<\/p>\n
FENZ incident controller Renee Potae said they would need to be vigilant over the next few hours, as temperatures would be high.<\/p>\n
“The fire is still active on many parts of the incident ground and crews are working to extinguish fires while also removing fuel to prevent the fire spreading further.”<\/p>\n
Dry and windy weather had been causing flare-ups and increasing the amount of smoke in the area, Potae said.<\/p>\n
“We were predicting some tough conditions, and they’ve arrived.”<\/p>\n
A lot of time had been spent preparing for the hottest part of the day, and crews were ready to deal with the harsh conditions, she said.<\/p>\n
“We’ve got our helicopters and ground crews working hard to contain the flare-ups, to get us through the heat of the day.”<\/p>\n
Although they had held the fire at 100ha for much of the day, they would only say it was contained once the active fire had died down, Potae said.<\/p>\n
If the rest of the afternoon went well, they would be hoping to move into a “containment mode” on Tuesday, but that would not be determined until later on Monday evening.<\/p>\n
The blaze had burnt through cutover forest across several gullies and had reached standing trees and was burning in several locations by 10pm Sunday.<\/p>\n
Crews had to scale back their response when it got dark because of the steep terrain.<\/p>\n
A small crew remained to patrol through the night and put out spot fires on the access road.<\/p>\n
On Monday, the response was back in full swing.<\/p>\n
“The fire has meandered into the ground fuels underneath the tall trees so this morning we’ve had helicopters and we will follow with ground crews,” Potae earlier told RNZ.<\/p>\n
“Working in the area of the tall trees just to ensure it stays along the ground, we don’t want it to move up the trunks into the tall trees, which it hasn’t yet, so we’re working really hard to contain the fire into a manageable state,” she said.<\/p>\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/4JWD4OY_Parikino_aerial_png\")
<\/p>\n
\nAn aerial view of the Lismore Forest fire at 8am Monday 15 December 2025.
\nPhoto: Fire and Emergency NZ\n<\/p>\n
“The temperature is starting to heat up already, but we’ve got light winds,” Potae said.<\/p>\n
“After lunch however we’re expecting a north-westerly to be stronger, perhaps 20-25km an hour and maybe gusting stronger, and low humidity after lunch which makes quite a big difference, so we’ve got the aircraft and the ground crews working really hard while we’ve got this period of relatively low fire behaviour.”<\/p>\n
The fire fight was a strategic one, Potae said.<\/p>\n
“There are areas in the cutover where there is active fire but we can sort of let that burn for a little while we concentrate on our more pressing tasks, and then move to those secondary tasks once we’re on top of what we think are the priorities, it just requires a lot of strategy and prioritisation with different types of fuel in the same fire ground,” she said.<\/p>\n
It was not yet known what caused the fire, Potae said.<\/p>\n
FENZ said firefighters would continue to work closely with the forestry company that managed the forest.<\/p>\n
Planning was also underway for operations overnight and into tomorrow.<\/p>\n
Sign up for Ng\u0101 Pitopito K\u014drero<\/a>, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Lismore Forest fire in fire spread under tall trees by 2am on Monday 15 December 2025. Fire…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[48,47,42,43,49,46,44,45,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-185094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-audio","tag-current-affairs","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-podcasts","tag-public-radio","tag-radio-new-zealand","tag-rnz","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}