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By Laura Millan and Joe Wertz
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
40C (104F) 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 (116
square miles). The town was not alone in its
misery, as dozens of similar blazes were
erupting across Spain and Portugal over
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.
Wildfires
near Larouco on Aug. 13. Photographer:
Miguel Riopa/Getty Images
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
kilometers — 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 wild 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.”
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, and
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.”
Spanish
soldiers engage in clean up operations in San
Vicente De Leira on Aug. 21. Photographer:
Brais Lorenzo/Bloomberg
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.
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 the department of Aude in southern
France this summer. The region suffered its
worst fires in more than 70 years, with 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.”
Burnt
woodland following a wildfire in Aude, France,
on Aug. 8. Photographer: Angel
Garcia/Bloomberg
Some
vineyards that were looked after survived the
blaze. Photographer: Angel
Garcia/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.
Firefighters
battle a forest fire near the Cypriot village
of Omodos on July 24. Photographer:
Etienne Torbey/Getty Images
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.”
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