Patricia Lamela was driving back to the Galician town of Larouco in northwest Spain when she got the call. It was Aug. 13, just before 7 p.m., and a neighbor told her there was a fire in the forest.
Lamela, the mayor of Larouco, wasn’t surprised by the news. The area around her small village of less than 500 residents had been baking at temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius for over two weeks amid one of the longest and hottest heat waves on record in Spain. Weeds and bushes that had thrived during a particularly wet spring dried up and became fuel to the fire. The absence of people cleaning and maintaining the forest in one of Spain’s least populated regions meant a large blaze was only a matter of time.
With her hand still on the steering wheel, Lamela notified regional authorities and asked for help. Then, she called the clerk to get the town’s only fire truck ready and asked a nephew to post a message on the village’s WhatsApp group calling for volunteers.
“For the first few hours, it was just us neighbors and our truck,” she said. “The regional government and their resources were fighting fires elsewhere.”
Within hours the Larouco fire became the biggest on record in Galicia, burning through more than 300 square kilometers. The town was not alone in its misery, as dozens of similar blazes were erupting across Spain and Portugal in mid-August, overwhelming authorities and leaving officials struggling to coordinate extinguishing efforts across dozens of agencies and departments, according to multiple accounts by local politicians, firefighters and neighbors who all fought the flames themselves.
Beyond the Iberian Peninsula, it’s been a similar tale of destruction in Europe. This year more than 1,900 wildfires have sparked across the European Union, scorching a record 9,860 square km — an area larger than Cyprus, according to satellite estimates from the EU’s European Forest Fire Information System.
Climate change is playing a major role in the endless scenes of smoke and fire. Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, and the searing heat and drought that fueled this summer’s blazes will intensify in the coming decades, setting the stage once again for strong winds to fan flames and spread fires. Yet global warming is only part of the story: a lack of coordination between agencies, fragmented land ownership and under-resourced fire services also turned many outbreaks into uncontrollable blazes. While some countries like Greece have begun to demonstrate how major investment in monitoring and firefighting equipment can soften the worst outcomes, Europe still faces risks ahead as the world continues to break new temperature records.
For Galicia, one of Europe’s most fire-prone regions, this summer overturned long-held assumptions about how blazes behave. As Lamela explained, fires had always raced uphill in her town, not down. Volunteers believed that if they protected the village at the bottom of the valley, they would be safe. The flames were expected to burn through the forest and stop at the ridge, buying time for regional crews to arrive and put them out.
On Aug. 13 that didn’t happen. The flames continued to climb the incline before winds caused the fire’s path to move unpredictably.
“That fire had a weird behavior the whole time,” Lamela said. “First it went up, and then it crossed the ridge and went down at incredible speed toward [the village of] Freixido.”
Burnt woodland in the Galician province of Ourense
| BLOOMBERG
In Larouco, volunteers worked days without rest. One firefighter collapsed after 17 hours straight on the job. The support crews they received from the local, regional and central governments, as well as the army, was intermittent and never enough, as similar fires broke out simultaneously in neighboring towns. For the first time ever for forest fires, Spain activated the European Union’s Civil Protection Mechanism, which allows EU members to request help from other countries in the bloc.
“We were not ready for this,” Lamela said. “There was a lack of coordination, but what coordination could there be when it was so violent, so big and fast and happening everywhere at the same time? We would have needed three command posts and four times as many resources as we had.”
Still, swift action was not helped by political bickering. Even after the immediate emergency was over, a fire at a municipal dump containing plastic waste in the neighboring town of A Rúa burned for over two weeks amid a dispute between rival county and regional political parties over who should extinguish it, said María González, the mayor of A Rúa. “Meanwhile, no one was doing anything,” she said.
Across the Spanish border, there were other bureaucratic bottlenecks preventing Portugal from tackling its wildfires with speed this summer. Last month Conservative Prime Minister Luís Montenegro was criticized for not moving quickly enough to request firefighting help from the EU and failing to declare a “state of calamity” that would have unlocked more resources to affected areas. Government decisions often need to be approved at weekly cabinet meetings, which in August are less frequent due to summer holidays.
Burnt woodland following a wildfire in Aude, France
| BLOOMBERG
Beyond politics, one of the thorniest issues for preventing wildfires in Europe has been the region’s patchwork of private land ownership.
Most forest area in northern Spain and Portugal is privately held and divided into thousands of small plots of land, many held by absentee owners who neither maintain nor even know they own the property. Legally, they must clear brush. As an old Galician saying goes, fires are not extinguished in summer, but in winter by keeping the forest clean. Yet enforcement is almost impossible.
The consequences are stark. Take what happened in A Rúa. Fires burnt much of the town’s privately-owned patches of forest and abandoned agriculture fields — leaving a grim, charred landscape. But satellite images showed the disaster didn’t spread to the village and its immediate surroundings, where for decades locals have grown Godello vineyards, a variety that produces a white wine known for its citric taste, similar to Chardonnay.
“The vineyards saved us,” said González, the mayor. “If the rest of our land was managed that way, maybe some would have burnt, but not 30,000 or 40,000 hectares.”
Similar dynamics played out in southern France’s Aude department this summer. The region suffered its worst fires in more than 70 years, where an area bigger than Paris burned.
The most significant damage was on land where vineyards no longer existed and had been abandoned prior to the fires. “Everywhere there were vineyards, for the most part, the fire was stopped,” French Prime Minister François Bayrou told journalists during a tour of the burnt area in August. “Where there were no longer vineyards, where thickets, scrubland, and garrigue had taken their place, we saw the catastrophe worsen, with the fire spreading faster.”
Vineyards and well-maintained wilderness areas often survived the blazes that burned large swaths of land in Europe.
| BLOOMBERG
Even with best practices and billions of euros of funding, climate change is making wildfires harder for governments to snuff out in Europe.
In Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, all of which experienced large blazes this summer, such extreme conditions would have happened once in a century in a world without climate change. Today, they’re expected to happen once every two decades, according to World Weather Attribution scientists at the Imperial College in London.
Planetary warming made these fires ten times more likely and 22% more intense, according to an August report from the consortium, which studies the influence of climate change on natural disasters. A second report published by the group earlier this week concluded that the extreme weather made fires in Spain and Portugal 40 times more likely and about 30% more intense.
Mediterranean wildfires are not just made worse by climate change — they’re contributing to it too. Carbon emissions from wildfires in Spain rose to the highest in at least 23 years following this summer’s blazes, according to the EU’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.
With a view to preventing future disasters, Greece is implementing a 2 billion-euro ($2.3 billion) program using financing from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility to buy amphibious firefighting aircrafts, drones for aerial monitoring, detection and extinguishing systems, control centers and over 1,000 firefighting vehicles. The country has also beefed up efforts to prevent blazes, including cleaning forests.
These measures have helped Greece avoid the uncontrolled and simultaneous massive fires that have ravaged Spain, France and Portugal this summer. Still, it was not without disruption: around 32,000 people were evacuated this season, including 5,000 tourists on the island of Crete. At least one person died, 13 firefighters were injured and half of the island of Kythera was scorched.
Apostolos Voulgarakis, a wildfire expert at the Technical University of Crete and a co-author of the Imperial College study, notes the region around Athens has already lost over 40% of its forested area in less than a decade.
Europe’s record fire season is showing that climate change is loading the dice toward disaster, with even well-prepared countries struggling to keep forests safe. “In Greece we don’t have a particularly encouraging picture,” Voulgarakis said. “It’s been the third consecutive summer with a catastrophic fire season that’s in many ways unprecedented and hitting different parts of the country without any distinction.”
www.japantimes.co.jp (Article Sourced Website)
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