Tubby blokes in orange and blue uniforms

We’ve been watching Spain burn for the past couple of weeks. It must be absolutely terrifying to be close to such huge areas on fire. You only need to think about the heat from a puny municipal bonfire to imagine watching the equivalent of a thousand or two thousand, or however many, of those bonfires race through the treeline towards your town, your village, your farm, your house or your family and animals. My good fortune has been only to see it on TV.

Something I noticed, among the reports centring on the firefighters, the Guardia Civil or the crews of the water planes and helicopters, was that there were the occasional references to Civil Protection. Not as heroes on the ground nor as any sort of active participant but nonetheless there, lurking in the background. For instance, when the rail service between Madrid and Galicia was about to be restarted the news channels mentioned that ADIF, the people who look after the rail network, were waiting for the say-so of Protección Civil. Then today, as the fires quietened down the PP party was rounding on the chief officer of the Civil Protection organisation who was, presumably, appointed by the Socialist Government.  Mind you that's Spanish politics for you – always confrontation rather than cooperation.

My own contact with Protección Civil comes from local events - the fiestas, the parades and concerts. where Protección Civil, in their blue and orange uniforms, seem to be the dogsbodies to the local police. They are just another of the identifiable services out for the day, like the Red Cross or the Guardia Civil. They are usually seen idling around the barriers to stop traffic passing or something equally mundane. I don't want to be too unkind about their physical aspect but I suspect that most of them are not picked for their athletic appearance or their sartorial elegance. Adjectives like fat, bald, spotty and scruffy spring to mind. 

I have used the English Civil Protection and the Spanish Protección Civil interchangeably in this piece though I think we Brits used Civil Defence for something similar in the past. 

Those Sunday afternoon volunteers are only a tiny and visible part of the organisation which is Protección Civil the organisation responsible for the big, overarching, plans that encompass every sort of response to an emergency from field kitchens and water bowsers to sending in the frontline responders. 

At the top of the structure sits the Dirección General de Protección Civil y Emergencias, part of the Ministry of the Interior. Its main role isn't incident management but designing the structures and procedures which should be in place in each region to deal with almost any contingency.

Beneath this the 17 autonomous communities run their own Civil Protection services. These regional bodies draft emergency plans, maintain equipment stockpiles, and operate coordination centres within their territory. This includes everything from monitoring flood risks or weather alerts to mounting fire watches, stockpiling firefighting assets, and maintaining the 112 service to co-ordinate and channel information between the various monitoring systems and responders.

Against this background of plans and more plans the first line of defence are the local town halls who have their own plans and resources to be used in an initial response, be that through local police, firefighters, Civil Protection volunteers or other organisations like the Red Cross. The idea is that they know their local area as well as anyone. It’s the town halls that initially decide which roads to close, where to open shelters, and how to relocate families from danger in cases of torrential downpours, high winds, floods, fires and plagues of locusts.

When incidents intensify, regional Civil Protection mobilises wider resources: fire brigades, medical personnel, helicopters, and so on, with the 112 service key in moving information to and fro between operators, monitors and ground responders. The initial source of much of that information being calls from the general public. The idea is to ensure that the various emergency services are kept in the loop at all times. For large or cross-border crises, the national level steps in and that may include the Unidad Militar de Emergencias (UME) which is a specialised military unit trained in disaster response, including floods, forest fires, and earthquakes. The regions can call for UME support when civilian capacities are insufficient.

Firefighting in Spain combines regional and municipal teams, reinforced when needed. Forest firefighters (bomberos forestales) often team up with municipal fire brigades, particularly where urban areas meet open countryside. When fires threaten extensive rural regions or towns, water-dropping helicopters and aeroplanes—managed by regional governments and backed by national and, if need be, EU resources—help control flames from the air.

In the recent spate of forest fires in Spain, there has been a lot of mudslinging about who should be doing what. The truth is that nobody much worries about the fires until they are raging. The cliché that the battle to contain them is won when there are no fires may be well worn but it's almost certainly true. The key elements are clearing the dead undergrowth that provides easy fuel for the fires and maintaining, and widening, the firebreaks. Once upon a time animals would graze away a lot of that undergrowth and the locals would maintain the firebreaks. Now that much of rural Spain is effectively empty, or home only to an aged population, that job has to be done by someone paid to do it. And the cost, and cost cutting, by regional governments, is one of the key elements behind the size and intensity of the fires.

Responding to a natural crisis must be enormously complex, involving layers of local, regional, and national systems. It’s no surprise there are lapses, but it is interesting to realise that those tubby blokes in orange and blue are part of a much bigger, and often very efficient, setup.