Going on fire

I read somewhere that 10% of the Earth's surface is on fire at any one time. I couldn't actually find anything to confirm that on Google but I did find something very scientific looking which said 340 million hectares of the planet burns every year. That's a lot of land. A hectare is 10,000 square metres, the land required as the plot for a new rural build house in Alicante. If you're not a local hoseholder then an International football pitch is usually about three quarters of a hectare. 

As I type the fire at Venta del Moro, on the border between Valencia and Cuenca provinces, is just about under control. A fire in Spain is classified as big when it burns more than 500 hectares. Venta del Moro left 1,300 hectares in ashes. A few weeks ago the Sierra de la Culebra in the North east of Zamora province burned 30,000 hectares. 

Firefighters classify these forest and grass fires into generations. The sort we've had around here, so far, have been First Generation. This means there is some grass or some trees to burn so the fire can run through this fuel until it reaches a fire break or until it is stopped; 1st Generation have extension. Even these relatively small fires can kill; I'm sure you remember that someone was killed out at Rodriguillo last year. Second Generation fires add speed to their characteristics; extension and speed. Third Generation add intensity; extension, speed and intensity. Fourth Generation is used to designate fires which threaten a built up area. By Fifth Generation we're onto fires that have extension, speed and intensity and they are also multi focus. Last year Spain had a series of Sixth Generation fires. These burn so intensely that they produce their own climate; basically they produce deadly and unstoppable firestorms.

Each and every year forest fires are big news in Spain. Over the past few years some of the bigger ones seem to have been more ferocious than ever. Apparently, worldwide the number is on the increase. Think Canada, Bolivia, Sweden, Indonesia, Australia, Portugal, the USA. The question is why are there more and more fires?

Experts reckon that one of the causes, stand ready to be shocked, is Global Warming. Back in 2007 our then President, Mariano Rajoy, said there was no such thing as climate change because his cousin, a university professor, said it didn't exist. Rajoy believes in Global Warming now. I don't think Donald Trump does. Apparently the forests are stressed, weakened, because they have been in an unusually warm environment for so long. They may be drier so when they do go on fire they burn more easily and put up less of a fight against their natural enemy. This means that 6th Generation fires can burn ten times as quickly as the 5th Generation ones. 6th Gen can devour 10 kilometres of forest in an hour, that's 5,000 hectares in a day.

Another reason, in Spain, is that Spaniards live on the coast and Madrid. Fewer and fewer people live in the countryside. Forests which used to be worked, land where people used to collect the brushwood for their home hearths, land where farmers routinely cleaned firebreaks, land where the natural patterns of agriculture with walls and terraces and fallow fields and different crops from plot to plot and clean tracks all produced natural firebreaks or at least ground that could be turned into a defensive position when the time came to fight. Around our house there used to be goats for instance. When the goatherd became too old nobody wanted to spend their days walking with goats. It was old fashioned. Nowadays our local goats don't wander and graze and fart in the open air. They are kept in a shed and fed on industrial feed. Our roadside verges and fields were mown naturally. Not any more. The field across from us was traditionally ploughed and planted. Now it just grows very flammable grass.

Spain has a lot of fire fighting kit, more than the majority of countries. An article I read said there were over 500,000 firefighting units including a lot of fire fighting aircraft. This is why so many fires don't spread. If this first barrier fails though, especially if the fire has fuel and time to develop into one of the Sixth Generation superfires, it doesn't matter how many tenders and pumps and firefighters there are because the only reason those fires go out is because they run out of fuel. Traditionally the "forest brigades", the firefighters who deal with these big fires are recruited for the hotter months, the summer months when, logically enough, there are more fires. Now, with climate change, the fires start earlier in the year and finish later. But the firefighters are not being employed for longer. The consensus is that the firefighters should be doing what the goats and farmers used to do in the months when they are less likely to be needed to fight fires. Cleaning the countryside to make it less flammable. As an aside cleaning the land in the hot summer months means that the firefighters might start tired when they are faced with a real fire. The problem, as always, is, who pays? Prevention may make good sense but the money spent is going into something that doesn't happen. This temporary employment pattern or the forest brigades also means that seasoned firefighters can't live from their "part time" jobs. They find other work and, if that work turns into a permanent job away from firefighting then so be it.

Another difficulty is that the firefighting contingency plans have not been updated to take account of these new circumstances. When the Sierra de Culebra burned it had the bad grace to start before, what everyone in Spain recognises as, the start of summer, July 1st. That's when the temporary firefighters jobs start. Only 40% of the firefighters contracted for the "fire season" were ready to go. But good planning might be a bit deeper than just employing the firefighters for longer. People leave the countryside usually for work. Planning which helped keep people in rural areas might mean that the natural firebreaks of cultivated land were back in place, planning that subsidised old style livestock farming instead of intensive mega farms might leave sheep and goats to clean up for us. Odd to think that installing decent Wi-Fi and mobile phone networks might help to control forest and grass fires.

And the last reason for fires. Us of course. We flick fag ends out of car windows without thinking. We have a barbecue that sets fire to some grass that gets out of control. We dump glass bottles from our picnics without a thought and then of course there are people who do it on purpose because if they set this or that piece of land on fire they can later push for the once rural land to be built on.

Careful with that axe, Eugene!

I've heard that about 10% of the Earth's surface is on fire at any one time

Spain has lots of wildfires. The number of times they are started by people, both inadvertently and on purpose, is alarming. The farmers who burn stubble, the people who flick fag ends from cars and the people who light barbecues in the countryside are oddly surprised when it all gets out of hand. There are also arsonists who start fires for reasons best known to themselves and their doctors. Fires can also start naturally, a lightning strike being the most common cause. Just like those potholes on British roads, fire breaks all over Spain are suffering from lack of spending. What should be a difficult barrier for the flames to leap, a defensible line for fire fighters to hold, is so full of weeds and shrubs that it offers no real barrier and the fires grow and spread.

There have been several fires in the local area over the past week or so. On the national scale they have not been big and they have not spread widely but seeing smoke on the horizon and watching fire fighting helicopters fly overhead is a bit anxiety making.

Just three days ago there was a fire within a couple of kilometres of where we live. It was put out quickly but the local police chief reminded people that if land is not maintained adequately then the costs of putting out the fire will have to be borne by the landowner. The news of the fires got picked up by our village WhatsApp group and there was an exhortation from the Town Hall representative in the village, the local "mayoress", for people to put their house in order. The little land we have, the garden, is weed free but just outside our boundary there is a lot of long dry grass. We have tracks bordering our property on two sides which are, so far as I know, and our Spanish neighbours agree, the responsibility of the Town Hall. Both Maggie and I commented in the WhatsApp group in a way which clearly showed that we were far from happy about how our part of the village is routinely forgotten. That neglect includes not cutting the verges back. One way and another the exchanges became a bit tense.

Concerned by the recent spate of fires, and by the local inaction, Maggie decided that she would have a go at hacking those weeds down herself. Now, to be honest, the tools we have are not much use against deep rooted two metre high grass. We tried though and the next door neighbour joined in and brought out the small tractor that he uses to plough his orchard. In the end we took about 20 garden refuse sack size bag loads off the verge alongside our house. It's better but it's still not perfect.

Still dripping with sweat I contacted the people who have the refuse collection contract for the outlying villages of Pinoso. I told them that we had left the 20 sack loads of cuttings by the side of the communal bin. They came back to say that whilst they collect old furniture and other household stuff they don't deal with garden waste and that I'd have to sort that myself. I'm sure you can imagine what I thought about that. Fortunately though, this morning, our mayoress was on the case and she turned up with the appropriate bloke from the Town Hall. He said he would arrange for the weeds to be cut back and that he'd get the cuttings taken away.

So that's where it rests at the moment.

Burning certificate

Spain goes on fire a lot. It happens more in summer when fag ends, thrown from moving cars, and seasonal barbecues don't mix with tinder dry pine forests.

There are small scale fires all over the place. We've seen fires on the hillside above Cartagena and even on the little mountain behind our house in Culebrón. In summer there are always a series of big fires. Occasionally people, especially firefighters, die and the inhabitants of rural villages are regularly evacuated. There are people who patrol the countryside trying to limit hazhards and provide early warning. Fire services have fire engines with huge ground clearances, to get them into areas without roads, and helicopters and water tanker planes, designed to drop thousands of gallons of water onto inaccessible forests, seem to be readily available.

Sometimes the fires happen naturally. Sometimes it's things like a dropped bottles that start fires without people being so directly involved. Sometimes it's those fag ends or a little garden bonfire that gets out of control. Lots of times it's done on purpose. A little burning to clear some nice building land, a bit of revenge against a despised neighbour. Country folk complain about the poor state of the firebreaks - badly maintained because of Government budget cuts.

We have some garden waste to get rid of. It will take the palm tree frond decades to compost. Maggie isn't keen on the pile of rotting vegetation at the back of the house. Burning seems like a good option.

I was vaguely aware of the need to get permission to have a bonfire from the local Town Hall so we went to ask. It wasn't hard. The chap gave us a quick rundown of the requirements - not within such and such a distance of trees, times of day, water on hand to extinguish the fire, only when the wind is below 10km per hour and whatnot. One stipulation was that the fire warning level should be below this or that intensity. Amongst the ways to check that was by following a Twitter account for the local emergency control centre. With the rules explained he checked the details of our address and then we signed a form, in triplicate. One for them, one for us and one for the local police. The signed and stamped certificate was emailed to us early the next morning.

I'm often told how Third World or how bureaucratic Spain is. It's not a view I usually share. Certainly, at times, there are things to complain  about, certainly bureaucracy can be overbearing but, wherever you live, I suspect the same is true for you at times too.

Having some control on burning garden cuttings though in a country that seems quite flamable sounds pretty sensible to me.