‘Unlike any other kind of fear’: wildfires leave their mark across Spain | Spain

HEN Saturday, Paüls people, the boss saints will celebrate the feast of Sant Roc, then will follow a common meal eaten at the stone tables. Jota Folk dances and a deep and permanent feeling of relaxation.

Last month’s forest fire – night sky turned the orange of hell, darkening the surrounding hills and 3,300 hectares swallowed (8,154 acres) a proximity that mixes land-lands, 2009 Blaze Near Horta and killed five firefighters in Sant Joan.

“People were afraid that everything would burn and lose everything, En said Enric Adell, the Mayor of the Little Catalan Mountain town. “They were afraid of falling into the trap and not being able to leave the village.”

Such a fear of fire adds, different from other kind of fear.

“We have gone through a pandemic and country -wide power cut and heavy rain, but a fire on this scale was something else like it was later, A says Adell.

On the hills in the village square, the charred trees reminds us of what can happen without the courage of one of the hundreds of firefighters. Antonio SerranoHe died. The winds that changed the winds and pure chance played a role.

“When a fire strikes, the Mayor says,“ He really leaves a mark. ”

This summer fires left its traces throughout the length and width of Spain from Galicia and Castilla Y León in the northwest to Catalonia in North-East, from smart suburbs outside Madrid to Extrader in the southwest.

In addition to panic and increasingly familiar smoke thong, this year’s fires brought them a sense of deja vu.

In the warm, deadly literature of 2022, the effects of climate emergency became increasingly clear, as Bare gave images revealing Spain’s great fragility. The images that entered the world in July showed ángel Martín, a 53 -year -old man from Tábara in Castilla Y León, to stop the fires in Sierra de la Culebra, who reached the town. In the video, the machine is swallowed by the flames before leaving Martín Inferno, burns the frame of clothes. Martín, a very popular figure in Tábara, lived up to 80% of his body and died in the hospital three months later.

Three years later, Spain once again defends.

“Fires are one of the parts of the impact of this climate change, so we have to do our best to prevent prevention,” The country’s Environment Minister Sara Aagsen told Cadena Ser Radio This week.

“Our country is particularly vulnerable to climate change. Now we have resources, but considering that scientific evidence and general expectation have a greater effect, we need to work to strengthen and professionalize these resources.”

Climate in Emergency FrontLine

As politicians enter the crime games, experts once again, It draws the number of water drain aircraft He misses the point. The existing fires have added, it could be completely predicted, and underlines the basic rethinking of land use and management on a continent on the front of the climate emergency.

“This year’s fires are basically at the levels we saw in 2022 and 2023, Mark said Marc Castellnou, the Head of the Fire Department of the Catalan Regional Fire Department and a fire analyst at the University of Lleida.

“Since 2017, we have seen this change towards more extreme fires… This is not something new – and it happens because climate change brings higher temperatures for a long time.”

It is not difficult to distinguish the dynamics. If you have a large land area of rural depopulation for decades, if you have a longer and longer annual heat waves that are longer and longer in a country that has grown, over -enlarged or homogeneous breeding, you will have large fires that are hard to fight. As a Spanish scientist stated At the beginning of this week: “There are all the ingredients for the Molotov cocktail we see right now.”

Cristina Montiel, a professor and expert in forest fires and land use at the University of Complutense, Madrid, is doing a “extraordinary magnificent gorgeous work that holds much larger disasters in the Gulf of Spain’s firefighters and other emergency services.

Despite the annual fires and abundance of evidence, he says, iz We are not aware of the danger we are experiencing – and we do not want to be – it turns out. ” If we were a little aware, we will make measures and decisions to protect ourselves ”. Fifty years ago, Montiel had most of the forest fires. However, today’s forest fires are caused by more accidents or neglect, and it is so arrogant due to two factors: landscape change and climate change.

An explosive combination. This year’s heavy spring rains have now led to an increase in plant growth dried by successive heat waves, which has left this flammable vegetation ready to serve as fuel for fires in most neglected areas. The situation is even more complex with the phenomenon of “flash drought”, which can quickly dry even well -watered agricultural land and become more common as global heating continues.

Pauls is an example. His population has decreased for decades and less and less in the region is working on the land due to shrinking economic rewards.

“If there are 100 people working on the land before, there are 30 now,” he says. “If the same policies continue and things remain as hard as it is, there will be almost no one in a few years.”

All this abandonment had grown over the valley, gullies and pine forests and made them a time interval that was activated with warmth. Mayor, last month’s fire could not be controlled, he says: “We saw that there is no way to stop.”

In the idea that there is all of the preparation and the old maximum maximum fires in winter ” – the difficulty now lies in the recovery of decades of neglect and bad planning that see that it has forgotten the landscape and that housing developments emerged in dangerous places.

However, Montiel said that it would be neither fast nor easy to rethink.

“If things have returned worse 50 years ago, now we can start to change them to make them better, or he says. “But now you can’t think that starting to change things will pay in two summer because it is not true. These things are processes.”

Sheep and goat ‘herds of fire’

However, there are some signs that the message has passed. After 16 years ago, Horta de Sant Joan Fire, a group of shepherds approached the Catalan fire department to ask what they could do to prevent more flames.

Conclusion Ramats de FOC (Flocks of fever) Shepherds, high -intensity and thus risk of high fever in areas of sheep and goat herds to graze the herds of firefighters coordinated with the schema.

In areas cleaned by ruminants, firefighters have better access and it is easier to control fires if they erupts because they erupt.

Marc Arcarons coordinated the initiative and coordinated the attempt under the auspices of the PAU Costa Foundation, which is not a profit in 2017, said, “We don’t need more helicopters or firefighters. “We can buy 200 more helicopters and will not solve the problem. Everything is about prevention and management.”

The program also helps to increase shepherds’ existing revenues, because participants can sell meat or cheeses as a certified Ramats de FOC, so that consumers know that the product contributes to the protection of the environment and the survival of traditional agriculture.

Approximately 120 shepherds participated in the project, which covers approximately 8,000 hectares (20,000 acres) in Catalonia. Similar schemes are planned or continues in Canary Islands and Andalucía.

Arcarons says that since the 1960s, the decrease in dependence on building materials and forested areas for grazing has once caused a patchwork of a patchwork of bonds, olive gardens and wheat fields to return to the intense forest.

It caused fires that were extremely difficult to control when rapidly growing and extremely flammable pines were dominant, shrubs developed and combined with this climate change and more frequent and longer drought periods.

“This is like a chimney, Ar Arcarons says. “If you finally continue to throw wood in the fire, the chimney will fire and the house will burn.”

Castellnou acknowledges that we seal our destiny without adapting our landscapes to the realities of climate deterioration.

“There’s no point in talking about more planes, or he says. “If we limit our capacity to extinguish fires, thinking that we need enough equipment to reveal them, we create an artificial, artificial situation for summer after excessive air summer.”