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Spain's worst wildfires: how the fire monsters are intensifying

2022-07-03T09:28:17.768Z


Official statistics from 1968 show that today the flames in the mountains go out earlier, but these improvements in extinction are covering up the appearance of more dangerous fires


The fire in the Sierra de la Culebra (Zamora) will not enter the statistics as the most devastating in the history of Spain.

Although the first calculations made from a helicopter view spoke of more than 30,000 hectares burned, subsequent measurements by the European Copernicus program based on satellite images reduced this figure to 22,760 hectares of forest area (25,216 if agricultural land is included).

In any case, it is among the worst fire monsters since the official historical series began in 1968. According to the state database, with the nearly 2,000 large fires of the last more than 50 years, to which it has had access EL PAÍS, this is the tenth time that a fire has burned more than 20,000 hectares of forest and in half of the cases this has happened so far in the 21st century.

Until now, the worst of these superfires registered in Spain were those of Minas de Riotinto/Berrocal (Huelva and Seville) in 2004, with 29,867 hectares burned, and that of Cortes de Pallás (Valencia) in 2012, with 28,879 hectares (these Figures refer only to forest area, they do not consider damage to agricultural crops).

The others occurred in one case in 1979, four of them in 1994, and the rest in 2012, 2021 and now, in 2022. Do fires destroy more today than in the past?

A firefighter walks through an area devastated by flames in the Sierra de la Culebra in June 2022.Luis Sevillano

According to the terminology used in state statistics, which considers large forest fires (GIF) to be all those that have burned more than 500 hectares, what the official figures say is that fewer of these fires are currently recorded, according to this database coordinated by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition based on the information sent by the autonomous communities.

Compared to the maximum peak of the historical series, which occurred in 1985, when there were 160 of these fires of more than 500 hectares, in 2018 there were three, in 2019 there were 14, in 2020 they reached 19 and last year there were They remained at 18. This proves the important advances in the country's extinction services, which in most cases today put an end to the flames in the mountains quickly,

before they even burn one hectare.

However, this is only part of the reality, because at the same time that the large fires decrease, the proportion of the most dangerous monsters increases, the super fires of exceptional size that exceed the means of extinction.

For Dalmau-Rovira, forestry engineer and director of the environmental consulting firm Medi XXI GSA, precisely this high efficiency of the extinction services in recent decades is one of the factors that fuel these huge fires, since the fire has stopped

cleaning

forests naturally.

"It's the paradox of extinction: as we become more efficient at putting out wildfires, we encourage larger fires because more combustible material accumulates," he says.

“To this we must add that we have excluded herbivores and humans from these ecosystems, which consumed part of that biomass.

Before, these large fires were impossible because people used firewood for cooking and heating, but we have gone from an overexploitation of many forest areas at the beginning of the 20th century, to an excess of abandonment today”.

Marc Castellnou, head of the Forestry Actions Group (GRAF) of the firefighters of Catalonia, agrees that the greater success in eliminating "more docile" fires contributes to creating "more extreme" ones, favoring not only that there are greater load of combustible material but also a more continuous forest landscape through which the flames can advance.

But, in addition, this firefighter believes that the improvement of the extinguishing services is precisely covering up the intensification of the fires in the statistics, since he defends that a current large fire is not the same as another that burned the same hectares 40 years ago.

"We have an extinguishing capacity now that is almost three times that of the 1980s," says the firefighter.

“Politicians say: according to statistics we are doing better.

But no, we are not doing better, no way”.

The head of the GRAF of the firefighters of Catalonia considers that the area burned is not a good indicator of how a fire burns and provides other measurements that give a very different view, such as the speed of the flames or their intensity.

“These current large fires are almost 200% faster than they were, their average speed has gone from 0.8-1.2 km/h to 2.3 km/h today.

And the average intensity of crown fires used to be around 8,000-10,000 kilowatt meters, but now they are exceeding 60,000 kilowatt meters”, he stresses.

"These are real measures of fire behavior and they are increasing without discussion," underlines Castellnou, who emphasizes that "in Portugal there have been fires of 140,000 kilowatt meters of intensity and in the Sierra de la Culebra they reached 90,000 kilowatt meters."

As more combustible material accumulates in forest areas, fires can become an inferno even without reaching extraordinary dimensions.

This is confirmed by Dalmau-Rovira, who says that at the Spanish Forestry Congress held this week in Lleida, the 2021 Castellví de Rosanes (Barcelona) fire was given as an example, which does not even appear on the list of major fires, given that it burned 197 hectares.

As this forest engineer explains, the firefighters who came to put it out last year were perplexed to see how the flames generated two pyrocumulus, one of the worst nightmares in a fire (convective clouds that trigger their virulence).

"In 40 years, the amount of energy accumulated in the mountains in the form of biomass has doubled in the country, due to the reduction of herbivores and the abandonment of rural areas," he points out.

Aerial view of the area affected by the fire in Minas de Riotinto/Berrocal (Huelva and Seville) in 2004, the largest fire recorded in Spain, which destroyed 29,867 hectares of scrub, eucalyptus, pine and cork oaks. CHEMA MOYA (EFE)

Elsa Pastor, a researcher at the Center for Technological Risk Studies (CERTEC), also considers that an intensification of the fires is taking place.

As she emphasizes, "in Catalonia it has been proven that there are more fires that exceed 10,000 kilowatt meters of intensity."

Despite this, the statistics prove that no more hectares per year are currently burned than in the past, although there has been an increase in the average area burned in fires in recent decades.

In reality, the more than 50 years of the General Statistics of Forest Fires (EGIF) show great variability from year to year due to another decisive factor: the weather.

The most obvious case is 1994. This was a catastrophic year marked by an early heat wave at the end of June, after a harsh period of drought in much of the Iberian Peninsula.

The result was 88 large fires that devastated more than 335,749 hectares, including four of the 10 worst fires in history: in Millares (Valencia), Requena (Valencia), Villarluego/Olocau del Rey (Teruel and Castellón) and Hellín/ Moratalla (Albacete and Murcia).

Search engine: all major fires since 1968

In the Sierra de la Culebra, this June, it was also known that the heat was going to be extreme, so it is surprising that the alert was not extended.

As Lourdes Hernández, an expert in forest fires from the environmental organization WWF, points out, there were 40 degrees of temperature and exceptional dryness, along with gusty winds.

"In these situations it is impossible to put out the fire, because it becomes too dangerous for firefighters," says the environmentalist, who recalls that these heat waves will be more frequent with climate change.

According to José Ramón González Pan, a member of the College of Technical Forestry Engineers, with extensive experience in firefighting, "in the Mediterranean conditions are getting worse and worse."

As he emphasizes, "statistics say that the number of accidents and the area burned have decreased, but when a large fire occurs, it is seen that there is a lot of dry vegetation due to rural abandonment and the lack of action in the territory."

The same is the opinion of Javier Madrigal, professor at the Higher Technical School of Forestry Engineers of the Polytechnic University of Madrid: "From the point of view of extinction we have good resources at the regional and state level, but the landscape fails us, which is not prepared for these fires, and that is a consequence of a socio-cultural issue and the lack of investment in rural areas”, he stresses.

Forest fire in Cortés de Pallás (Valencia) in 2012, the second largest in the historical series. CARLES FRANCESC

Can superfires be curbed by further increasing the means of extinction?

For Pastor, "those of us who are dedicated to the analysis of fires agree that the solution is not more aerial means or more hoses, but to make a more intense prevention policy, manage the forest, treat natural spaces."

"It is necessary to turn the landscape into a mosaic," he emphasizes.

"If a fire is in a forest mass and reaches an agricultural area, or an extensive area, it will not progress and the extinction services will be able to deal with it without problems."

For his part, Hérnandez, from WWF, considers that a strategy is necessary for the promotion of sustainable extensive livestock farming and the improvement of working conditions for people who dedicate themselves to grazing in the Spanish mountains.

The autonomous communities, councils and councils have some 27,000 professionals dedicated to firefighting in the summer, according to a count by EL PAÍS, which added to the 1,000 professionals from the Ministry of Ecological Transition and the 1,400 from the Military Emergency Unit give a figure close to 30,000 people.

"Spain has one of the best fire-fighting devices in all of Europe, and the campaign has also been extended to May and October," says González Pan, who does not share that the fires are now worse, but more dangerous, because today is the forest closer to human settlements.

Regarding the number of helicopters, seaplanes and planes to put out fires, according to Dalmau-Rovira, Spain has more aircraft for every million hectares of forest area (9.7) than countries like the US (2.7), according to data 2017. However, he also insists that this is not the problem today.

“We are very good at putting out fires, it is not a question of more means, but of investing in forest management, in the primary sector, in livestock and in forestry education, so that people understand that cutting down a tree is not a crime. ”, he highlights.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-07-03

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