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ARCHIVED - Spain is in flames: Summer forest fire season comes early this year
A lack of rain in 2023 has meant that the large wildfires that hit Spain every summer have been brought forward
Spain’s 47 million people mostly live in large cities and urban centres. Anyone who has ever driven on a motorway in Spain will know that the country is made up of towns separated by miles and miles and kilometres and kilometres of farmland, scrubland, mountains and marshes.
There are fires all year round in Spain’s countryside, though they mostly occur in summer when the dry conditions in forests and rural areas create a sort of tinderbox, where any little spark could end up razing thousands of hectares to burnt ash.
This year, however, the wildfire season has started worryingly early, with several large blazes threatening various parts of the country by the end of March. This nearly unprecedented state of affairs has observers exceedingly anxious for what awaits us this July and August.
The fire in Castellón and Teruel, in eastern Spain, has been going for a week now, tearing through 4,700 hectares of land, and still has not been extinguished as gusts of wind of up to 70 kilometres per hour and humidity below 20% create a “high risk” situation, although some of the nearly 2,000 people who were evacuated for safety reasons are now being allowed to return to their homes.
Imágenes #IFVillanuevaViver. Un amplio dispositivo formado en total por más de 400 efectivos sigue trabajando en el control de este importante y temprano incendio forestal. Imágenes de la tarde de ayer. pic.twitter.com/WuMkA6xtwC
— Bombers Dipcas (@BombersDipcas) March 24, 2023
That wildfire has been joined, in the space of just a week, by other large-scale incidents in Asturias and Cantabria (northern Spain), Baleira (Galicia), Cieza (Murcia) and Yunquera (Malaga).
One firefighter commented of the at least 31 separate fires currently raging in the north, “The situation right now in Asturias and Cantabria is... Insane... No forest firefighting force is prepared for this. No one is. It is a situation of total alarm.”
La situación ahora mismo en Asturias y Cantabria es... Demencial... Ningún cuerpo de extinción de incendios forestales está preparado para esto. Nadie. Es una situación de alarma total. Muchísimo ánimo a todos los combatientes. Ojalá me mandasen a ayudar... Este es uno de los… pic.twitter.com/gquhslsPW7
— 🔥Óscar🚁 (@BomberoForestaI) March 30, 2023
In Cieza, the fire has mercifully been put out already thanks to the swift work of firefighters using helicopters to douse the flames. A total of 6,200 square metres were burnt, most of which was agricultural land, with very little affecting forest land.
But what this means for the rest of year is particularly distressing.
The summer of 2022 saw 310,000 hectares of forest burnt up, the worst year for forest fires in the whole of the 21st century, and firefighters are worried that 2023 could be worse.
Climate models from Víctor Resco de Dios, Professor of Forest Engineering and Global Change at Spain’s University of Lleida, project that “last year’s anomaly, when we experienced record temperatures, will be the norm in 2035. And that means that by 2050, a year like 2022 will be an anomaly, but at the other end of the scale, meaning that it will have been particularly cold.”
He continues, “Between now and the end of the century, the fire season will lengthen by between one and two days per year. In other words, we could see the fire season lengthen by an average of three months.”
This worrying trend is a result of increasing temperatures due to man-made climate change, but also because of what experts call the “firefighting paradox”: the better we are at extinguishing fires, the more we are increasing the probability of a large wildfire.
It is for this reason that sometimes the technique used by fire crews is to allow low-intensity fires to clear the forest, to remove the leaves and other flammable debris that serve as fuel for larger fires.
The great hope for stopping the forest fires from getting out of control this year is for more rain in April and May, which would dampen the earth and mean that any future fires don’t spread so fast.
So far this year, there have already been water shortages in Catalonia, where a submerged church has been revealed in a lake bed, and in Malaga, where a lack of rain may soon lead to a hosepipe ban.
But, given what we know about how the changing climate creates sudden and unexpected shifts in weather patterns, there is still a chance that we will have enough rain this spring to protect us from a repeat of last year’s forest fire situation.
Of course, torrential rain comes with its own problems, as anyone who has ever lived through one of Spain’s sometimes devastating floods can tell you. At this point, the outlook seems bleak, a Sophie’s choice in which we have no choice.
Image 1: Confederación Hidrográfica del Cantábrico
Image 2: Infoca
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