‘It’s only going to get worse’: wildfires forcing firefighters to make impossible choices | Wildfires

César Alcaraz had just become a firefighter in the late 1990s when he found himself ambushed in the middle of a fast-moving fire. Barely able to breathe and with no water left in his truck, he and his colleagues fled the inferno sweeping Spain’s Montgó mountain region, wishing their bosses would send more support.

But almost three decades later, as an officer in Alicante’s provincial firefighters, Alcaraz has more sympathy for the painful choices commanders have to make. When fires sweep through an area, his job resembles that of a doctor in an emergency room where there are few ventilators.

This dilemma is becoming more severe as bushfires worsen in the Mediterranean and are starting to confront cold countries like the UK, where bushfires are invading cities, homes and gardens.

“It’s not just about more fires to fight, it’s also about the risk of operational collapse,” said Alcaraz, who sits in the command center and has seen simultaneous fires occur earlier and more frequently in the year. “When two or three fires occur at the same time, we are forced to make urgent prioritization decisions.”

Deadly wildfires have gripped Western Europe this month, the terrifying result of a triple heat wave that turned lush vegetation into dry tinder, while isolated blazes are choking North America with nauseating smoke. France, Portugal and Spain are devastated by record numbers of forest fires for this time of year; An unprecedented swath of France was engulfed in flames and 13 people died in Spain. Britain started the week with 19 separate bushfires, leading experts to warn of a “wave of fires” more widespread than ever before.

Across the Atlantic, smoke from 100 fires burning through northern Ontario made Toronto the world’s most polluted city on Wednesday before crossing the U.S. border to smother New York. Widespread smoke from wildfires in Canada is so powerful it caused 82,000 premature deaths in 2023; 33,000 of them were in the United States and 22,000 in Europe, according to a study last year. On Friday, the EU’s Copernicus agency said summer smog was causing “extremely poor” air quality warnings in areas such as New Jersey, which hosts the World Cup final on Sunday.

The problem is not just hectares. Perhaps surprisingly, the global trend in the extent of wildfire has been towards fewer hectares of burned land; This is largely because huge areas of the African savannah that were vulnerable to fires have now been fragmented by farmland. But where fires occur, they are often hotter, less predictable, and more numerous. Carbon pollution has increased global temperatures, and as more heat is used to dry out plants, small fires can easily turn into hellish infernos. This allows wildfires to spread to areas that were not previously so vulnerable—forests and prairies, as well as cities, parks, and gardens—and increases the danger of what researchers call the wildland-urban interface.

In France, such extreme scenarios force authorities to divvy up scarce resources. Firefighters in France have been fighting 250-300 fires simultaneously in the past three weeks, civil protection agency chief Julien Marion said during a visit to the smoldering Fontainebleau forest on Thursday.

Firefighters fighting several fires at the same time in Spain say they are struggling with an increase in numbers and strength. The situation has been exacerbated by recent wet winters and springs that have allowed vegetation to thrive (leaving a greater surplus of fuel when summer inevitably dries), as well as the abandonment of farmland that has fragmented the once flammable countryside. Authorities on Thursday said they expected the massive blaze in rural Aragon, one of dozens still burning across the country, to take days to bring under control.

“Ultimately response capacity is limited,” said Juan Caamaño, head of education at the Pau Costa Foundation, a non-profit that helps Northern Ireland and other cold regions in Northern Europe prepare for worsening bushfires. “When we’re faced with these massive fires, these extreme events, it’s like sending firefighters to the beach to stop a tsunami.”

In England, where the fire danger is in grassy areas rather than forests, fires broke out from cities to national parks this month after the summer started with scorching heat. The bushfire that ripped through Walthamstow, east London, last weekend and is thought to have been caused by a falling tree striking power cables over the railway line, attracted around 125 firefighters to extinguish the blaze. Strong winds and dry vegetation helped the epidemic spread rapidly.

Wildfire scientist Dr. at the London School of Economics. “One of the worrying things I saw over the weekend was that there was a 100% chance of sustained ignition across large parts of the country,” Thomas Smith said. “Grass fuels, especially those that dry very quickly, only require 2-3 weeks of dry weather to reach these thresholds.”

In a report published on Wednesday, scientists in England stated that last year was the country’s hottest climate on record and said, “The climate of the 20th century is now gone.” Average temperatures, virtually unknown in the 1980s, now cover almost a fifth of the land as fire services struggle to extinguish fires stretching from Durham in the north to Devon in the south-west, scientists said. The next day, a fire in Scotland’s Cairngorms national park burned 300 hectares (740 acres).

Dr D., a bushfire scientist at the UK Center for Ecology and Hydrology. “Simultaneous forest fires put great pressure on emergency services,” said Maria Barbosa. “Fire departments depend on their ability to move personnel, equipment and aircraft between sites as conditions change. But when multiple large fires occur at the same time, this flexibility is greatly diminished.”

The shift from fighting all fires to waging war was “a very new thing for Northern European countries,” Smith said, though not for the Mediterranean. “While we are dealing with strategic decisions, they are having to change tactics while fighting the fire.”

The wildfire that destroyed 18 homes in the village of Wennington during a severe heatwave in July 2022 came on the worst day for London’s fire service since German bombs set the city on fire in the Second World War, London firefighters recall. To be more flexible, the service purchased four all-terrain support vehicles that are agile enough to reach places fire trucks can’t. Firefighting 4x4s with “pump and drive” capability have been mobilized 34 times this year, including normal fires.

London’s fire brigade has also encouraged local authorities and private landowners to implement natural firebreaks to stop fires from spreading by cutting grass near homes and businesses, plowing soil to remove flammable material and clearing dead leaves from gutters (types of strategies well-known to Australians).

As the number of firefighters declines, such advice becomes even more relevant. Steve Wright, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Association, said crew cuts were straining crews (there are 12,000 fewer firefighters in the UK today than in 2010) which was delaying their response to incidents and causing more fires to get out of control. “This is going to get worse and the government needs to address this situation,” he said. “This isn’t moorland or heathland. It’s happening in towns, cities and villages across the UK.”

The tensions felt by local services are also echoed at a global level. Fire seasons in North America and Australia are getting longer and increasingly overlapping; this hinders long-standing arrangements for sharing aircraft and firefighters between the United States, Canada and Australia. The overlap between the two regions is expected to increase from four to 29 days each year by 2050. study found last year.

While climate disruption is a key driver of increasingly “synchronized” global fire seasons, according to research Natural variation released in February often makes the situation worse. The return of El Niño, the cyclical weather pattern that amplifies extreme weather, has put Australia and Indonesia on alert because of the greater fire risk it brings. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology said this week that the emerging El Niño could be the strongest on record and could be joined by a positive Indian Ocean dipole, a related weather pattern that, along with El Niño, has led to some of Australia’s hottest and driest years. Large swaths of Southeast Asia and Oceania may soon go up in flames.

Are governments taking the threat seriously? “The climate emergency is causing deaths,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Monday during a visit to the forward command center in Almería, where firefighters extinguished one of the country’s deadliest fires on record. “As a result, all levels of government and society as a whole must rise to the challenge before us.”

But policies to reduce carbon pollution in rich countries still fall far short of what is needed to stop the planet from warming by 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. Meanwhile, efforts to use fire to manage land—for example, controlled burns that prevent overgrowth that fuels large fires—are still relatively new in these same countries. The exceptions are Canada and Australia, which have made efforts to incorporate Indigenous fire strategies rather than relying on suppression.

Cultural change among firefighters in Europe has begun to be reflected in policies. In late June, EU member states approved a non-binding strategy for managing bushfire risk, encouraging prescribed burning, manual bush clearing and more diverse landscapes. The civil protection mechanism, which allows embattled member states to request firefighting support from their neighbours, has been boosted this year by the pre-emptive deployment of firefighters from other regions. In 2025, record-breaking forest fires that destroyed 1 million hectares of land led to more requests for aid than ever before.

But Caamaño said that while the mechanism itself was “working perfectly,” firefighters were deployed in extreme situations they had never seen before. He was speaking from Indonesia, where fire crews were preparing for the “wild burn” that Southeast Asia will soon face.

“I always get the feeling that we are behind the emergency,” he said. “And rather than us managing the emergency, the emergency manages us.”