Fire and Brimstone
Figures measured in hectares don’t really mean much to most of us. A hectare is what you need to put up a house in the campo in Alicante province, but visualising 7,000 of those plots is beyond my imagination. The deadliest fire so far this year, around Los Gallardos and Bédar in Almería province, destroyed around 7,000 hectares, an area roughly the size of Leicester or Derby. Meanwhile, the huge fires in Zaragoza and Guadalajara have each burned more than 30,000 hectares, making each of them larger than the whole of Birmingham.
It isn’t only the scale of these fires that is frightening; it is the speed at which they can move. During the worst stages of the Guadalajara blaze, I heard one firefighter say the flames were advancing at 10 metres per minute — that’s a kilometre in ten minutes, or six kilometres an hour, faster than I could walk it. Official reports put the maximum speed closer to four kilometres an hour, but either way, think about what that means in practical terms. If a wildfire is two kilometres away, it could be on top of you in half an hour. Four kilometres away might mean you have little more than an hour. One report noted that the Guadalajara fire advanced some 14 kilometres overnight while people slept.
To put that into local context, imagine a major wildfire breaking out on the edge of Pinoso on a hot, windy afternoon. In Culebrón, at that fastest reported rate of spread, if you hadn’t gathered up the essentials — your kids, the pets, the escritura, your prescription drugs, official paperwork, computers — and shovelled them into your car to run for Monóvar within the hour, your delay could be deadly. An hour isn’t long, particularly if someone is hesitant to leave their home or dealing with mobility issues. In our house, it sometimes takes me longer than an hour just to find my reading specs.
Watching the television coverage, it also struck me that not all wildfires are the same. A blaze racing through dry grass or scrub is obviously dangerous, but it still looks like something firefighters can tackle. They can usually get close enough to attack it with hoses, beaters and water dropped from aircraft. A forest fire is another matter entirely. Once the flames climb into the tops of the trees, the whole thing seems to take on a life of its own. The heat becomes so intense that firefighters can no longer work close to the fire front, and burning embers can be carried hundreds of metres, sometimes even kilometres, ahead of the flames to start entirely new fires. Fighting the fire is simply impossible; it is bigger and stronger than we are. Instead, the work of the firefighters becomes containment and protecting property.
The Almería fire was particularly lethal because it killed thirteen people. I don’t remember numbers like that for a single incident since the 2005 Guadalajara blaze in the Riba de Saelices–Alto Tajo area, where eleven firefighters were trapped when the wind caused the fire to suddenly change direction, cutting off their means of retreat. Among those who died in Almería this year were several foreigners, including Britons and Belgians who had lived in the area for years. In the days that followed, there was a lot of chatter in the Spanish media about whether we foreigners lead lives so isolated from the society around us that we are not as aware of the news, the danger or the meaning of some of the official warnings because our non-Spanish information networks are not fast enough for such a rapidly changing situation. There is certainly some exaggeration in that, but the truth is that lots of us are in a bit of a foreigner’s bubble, and it made me wonder.
That thought came back to me today when I heard the head of Spain’s Civil Protection service being interviewed on the radio. She was asked what people should do if a wildfire threatened their homes. Her answer was straightforward: follow the instructions of the emergency services, such as the Guardia Civil, and pay attention to the official information channels.
The first part is obvious enough. If the Guardia Civil tells you to leave, you leave. If they tell you to stay where you are, you stay. They know far more about the situation than you do. It was the second part of her answer that made me wonder if I were living in that foreigner’s bubble. What exactly are these official information channels?
I assumed she meant reliable information sources like the radio or TV, but after spending rather longer than I expected questioning various AI search engines, I gradually discovered that wasn’t really what she meant at all. The official warnings are issued through the 112 emergency services. Here in the Valencian Community, that’s the GVA 112 app. Just over the regional border in Murcia, it’s the 112 Región de Murcia app. These are the services that send official alerts directly to your mobile phone and, should you get into difficulties, will send your location. I have often thought it’s one of the beauties of living in Western Europe that, if things go hideously wrong, emergency workers will almost certainly come and get us. Still, it’s better for everyone if we avoid needing them in the first place. Just to be clear, these apps are not the same as ES-Alert, the emergency warning system that sends alerts to every mobile phone in a defined area when there is a serious risk such as flooding, torrential rain or high winds.
I have all sorts of Spanish apps on my phone for weather, traffic, restaurants and a whole bundle of time-wasting social media apps, but it had never crossed my mind to have an emergency app. I do get notifications from the 112 centres on X, but I don’t bother with Musk’s network much anymore, and I can’t guarantee that I’d notice an X post. Thinking about that advice from Civil Protection, I had a look through the Play Store and downloaded the 112 applications. I have to say that neither app is likely to win any awards for design. They look as though they were put together by a group of enthusiastic twelve-year-olds on a school computing project. The Murcia one is particularly “Playschool”, with bright colours and big letters. Parts appear in something approximating English, other parts in Castilian Spanish and others in Valencian. The menus aren’t always intuitive, and they certainly aren’t polished. But I suppose, in the end, the glossiness is much less important than the functionality. If one of those clunky little apps tells you that a wildfire is approaching, or that your area is being evacuated, its appearance is the last thing you’ll care about. In that moment, it could well be the most important app on your phone.
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