Increasingly virulent fires in Catalonia force firefighters to change their strategy and "let burn"

The wave of fires that has recently ravaged Catalonia, more than 230 in five days, has revealed that the response capacity of the firefighting teams is exposed when the fire spreads out of control from several sources at the same time.

The feared "simultaneity" to which the firefighters allude has confirmed their ability to disrupt strategies of frontal attack on the flames and supports the turn that has been given to the intervention device: the fire is left to burn and it is expected where you can really stop him.

“Before, the firefighter would go where there was a fire and try to put it out as soon as possible, but now the strategy goes further, because what it is about is putting people at the point where it is effective”, reasons Asier Larrañaga, sub-inspector of the GRAF,

With forests heavily stressed by the lack of water and swollen with fuel by the accumulation of vegetation, the technicians defend that the change of tactics must be understood.

"We don't let it burn for no reason, but we reserve ourselves to have the resources available at those points where we will be really effective," says Larrañaga.

In the recent fires in Artesa de Segre and Solsonès, some neighbors, mayors and volunteers from the ADF (forestry defense associations) raised the tone against the firefighters' method, criticizing an alleged laziness on the attack front.

“It is true that the best time to put out a fire is when it starts to burn, but you cannot put a firefighter every hundred meters.

When someone closely experiences the start of a fire,

The head of the GRAF is Marc Castellnou.

Twelve years ago, during an intervention in the parliamentary investigation commission of the Horta de Sant Joan fire, in which five firefighters died, Castellnou, one of the most renowned international experts in the management of forest fires, already warned of the advisability of a rethinking of fire fighting strategies.

"If they authorize me to make the decision to abandon a fire because there is too much risk, believe me I will make it more than once," Castellnou snapped at the deputies.

The passage of time and the greater virulence of fire episodes have reinforced that argument.

"When the head of a fire advances, with flames more than five meters high, what is a firefighter going to be able to do with a hose?" asks Larrañaga.

The approach has changed towards defining a potential burning area and setting the red line at critical points.

"We establish some confinement axes, and we mark the points where we have the ability to anticipate the fire and prevent it from going from large to enormous," says Larrañaga.

And he illustrates it with the data that the firefighters considered in the recent Artesa-Baldomar scenario: “The fire could destroy 20,000 hectares, and we valued that we had the capacity to leave it at 5,000.

In the end they were less, but if we are going to make it only 400, it is possible that they would have ended up burning the 20,000″.

The Pau Costa Foundation is an entity that was born after the Horta de Sant Joan catastrophe (it bears the name of one of the deceased firefighters) and investigates fire prevention.

The forestry engineer Luis Beviera is one of its patrons and explains that this change in the virulence of the fires began to be detected more than a decade ago.

“We perceived that they would be more and more extensive.

The forest area had grown a lot due to the abandonment of agriculture and ancestral rural practices, such as taking advantage of forest biomass for heating," explains Beviera, who is also head of the Forest Management and Soil Protection Service of the Balearic Islands.

Beviera points out that the progressive abandonment of agriculture has also left the surroundings of the towns unprotected, since they have been covered with vegetation and on top of that they have been filled with second homes.

"The danger is no longer that trees burn, but people," she warns.

And he explains that in the event of simultaneity of fires, such as the one that hit Catalonia last week with an average of 45 fires per day, the available means must be used well in order to defeat the flames.

“You have to calculate where you can be most effective and prioritize the flank with the most potential…”, he adds.

Although above all he highlights the previous work: "It must be clear that extinction is the answer, but prevention is the solution."

And he points to the great challenge for present and future generations: "Adapting our landscape to climate change,

make a more resistant agroforestry land”.

One of the essential solutions, in his opinion, will be to boost the forestry industry, sometimes so reviled by the conservation sector.

“The urban world has to learn that planting trees helps make forests, but that the chainsaw helps save them.

What we do not manage, the fire will burn, ”he sentences.

A new climatic era of fire and drought

“It is absolute evidence.

It is a proven scientific fact that heat waves are increasing significantly and that they will do so more in the coming decades”, explains Jofre Carnicer, lead author of the chapter on the Mediterranean in the latest report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (IPCC).

The also professor of Biology at the UB and CREAF researcher explains that the Mediterranean basin, and therefore Catalonia, is an area that is particularly sensitive to climate change and that the fires, due to the enormous forest mass that covers Catalonia, will especially affect community.

As well as the drought, which will bring a lack of water for human consumption in vulnerable areas.

They are not scenarios of the future, but of the present: 20.

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