In case of emergency
It's pretty dry in Spain at the moment. Occasional stories about the state of the reservoirs turn up in the media every now and again and there are forest and scrub fires reported all the time - some of them burn out of control for days. Often the news story says that the fire was provoked by human intervention. This does not always mean that someone set the fires deliberately (though that is amazingly common) but it does include the sparks from the summer barbecue, the fag end tossed, carelessly, out of the car window and the garden waste fire getting out of control. Lots of the fire engines in Spain are designed to deal with forest fires. The bodywork sits on great big wheels and the vehicles are intended for off road as well as on road use. We've seen both aeroplanes and helicopters dropping water on fires. There is a special unit of the military - Unidad Militar de Emergencias - whose job is to intervene in national catastrophes. The hillsides have fire breaks cut into ...