It is said that San Francisco residents worry about every earthquake in case it is “the biggest one.” Something similar has happened to wildfire experts, especially in recent years. Even after quiet summers like the one they are about to say goodbye to—in which half the average area of the last decade burned in Spain—they know that they are in reality in a countdown to the arrival of the next uncontrollable fire. The conditions are increasingly complicated: the combination of the two elements that llamas need to feed themselves, climate and territory, has never been more favorable.
“When the fire breaks out in adverse weather conditions and in a territory with a lot of fuel, no one stops it.” Juan Picos, a researcher at the School of Forestry Education at the University of Vigo, does not speak of inextinguishable fires, but rather of temporarily uncontrollable fires. “There was not a single one left to put out, but how long have we had the situation out of control? As long as these crises last, the risk of suffering very serious damage is enormous and we must be prepared for irreplaceable things not to be taken away.”
“It’s a statistical question,” he says, with a more scientific than fatalistic mentality. “In Galicia, for example, the number of fires has decreased radically – from 15,000 to a thousand a year – but there are a thousand times more if you roll the dice every year. And we have to be prepared for the day when we get the result we don’t want.”
From the School, located on the Pontevedra Campus, they studied 31,642 fires registered in the community between 2010 and 2020, which burned a total of 229,235 hectares. A third, 81,665, were destroyed by only 34 fires – which exceeded a thousand hectares – and which represented only 0.1 percent of the total. If we add another 32 – those that burned between 500 and a thousand hectares –, the figure exceeds 105,000: practically half of the group. “In 30,000 rolls of the dice, we succeeded 66 times. That’s what is difficult to plan.
These 66 fires fall into the category of GIF (Large Forest Fires), which all exceed 500 hectares. However, Picos prefers to focus on fires with extreme behavior: those that are in conditions that prevent them from being controlled. “In Xurés, in winter, 500 hectares can burn in a low-intensity fire and not cause a big problem; in summer, on the beach, with a thousand people to evacuate, 50 hectares would be enough for a tragedy.”
Fight fire with fire
“We live in a schizophrenia between the pursuit of fire and its usefulness.” Although the total area burned is also decreasing – but not as sharply as the number of fires – a few major fires now represent almost as much as the many small fires of recent decades. “From 2006” – when nearly 2,000 fires were recorded, more than 80,000 hectares burned and four deaths in just two weeks in August – “the number of fires has decreased, because there is more persecution, more control of fires but also more abandonment of the activities that generated them. And since the one “that burned several times a year is no longer on the ground, the materials accumulate.”
For this reason, Picos believes that writing about all the hectares burned “makes us look bad.” And he admits that it will be practically impossible to stop using this method. “It will always be our reference, but we must understand that not everything is per hectare, it is important to know under what conditions. It is like counting the unemployed: we count the unemployed, but we also analyze the age, sex, duration… That is what we have to do here.”
And this is because a change is needed in the mentality of the fire services themselves. “He was very effective in the 90s with his method: arrive very quickly and stop very quickly. We were the best, but for that we spent a lot and used a lot of people. Today, the conditions are different. “When we see that now, even if we arrive early, we cannot put it out, the strategy changes.” We must now learn to fight fires without knowing how many days they will last.
It is easy to fall into military comparisons when faced with fire. The army prepared for lightning operations must now learn to besiege the enemy. “Before, you said, ‘Go ahead and put it out.’ Now, if you do everything you can, you may not have anyone to take over after eight hours, or helicopters to replace those who have to go refuel…”
Picos remembers two years in which these situations occurred. In 2017, the simultaneity of the fires did not allow any of them to act fully; in 2022 – a typical five-year cycle between two bad seasons – lightning strikes caused by several storms repeated the situation. “You can’t go to everyone with everything, and those you can’t go consolidate and increase. It’s about preventing them from reaching points of no return where they could become uncontrollable for a long time.”
In these lightning attacks, the brigades – at least in Galicia – were close to home. But in the new long campaigns, logistics are essential: finding a place to sleep, getting supplies… “Normally, this is what kills armies: it doesn’t matter to have a lot of tanks if you don’t have fuel for them.”
If you can’t change the weather, focus on fuel
“These trends are likely to continue as climate change projections suggest a global decrease in relative humidity and an increase in temperature that could increase the risk of future fires where fuels remain abundant.” The paper concludes Observed increase in extreme fire conditions due to atmospheric humidity and temperaturepublished in November 2021 in Nature coincides with Picos’ comments.
“This is happening virtually everywhere in the world. That means that these two patterns – climatic and territorial – are repeated in many other places. The climatic, because there is only one atmosphere; the territorial, especially in advanced countries, has a lot to do with society, with the abandonment of the countryside… here, in California and everywhere else,” he says.
“These are two megatrends that do not depend on governments or administrations,” which have the responsibility to respond to them. “We know that this draw will end up happening to us in five, seven, nine years… but the political bureau tends to believe that it will not be during the four years of its mandate, so it seems that the responsibility falls on the next ones.”
And if everything indicates that in five or seven years we will be living in 2017 or 2022 again, how can we prepare for the day when that happens? For Picos, it is clear. Even if increasingly detailed meteorological analyses can predict the behavior of a fire, it is not possible to intervene on the climate in the short term. “Our children will say if we have done something to stop climate change.” So all that remains is to continue working on the territory to try to ensure that the fire finds as little oil as possible.
Another paradox: “The less it burns, the more we have to invest in prevention.” Even if an extreme fire “burns anything,” its capacity will be less if it contains less food. This is what land management is for: selective burning, clearing, using livestock… And yet another almost military strategy: designing areas “where we can make ourselves strong and control it, looking for the opportunity to ambush it.”
This requires a change of concept. It is no longer enough to multiply temporary fighters, but rather “a professionalized service, trained to work in other conditions throughout the year”, and not only during the summer months that are moving closer and closer to autumn.
Betting against fire
Picos is one of the researchers of the European FIREPOCTEP+ project, which aims to strengthen forest fire prevention and extinction systems in the cross-border region between Spain and Portugal known as Raia. “We’re trying to move forward, to see where it would be wiser to act, where to avoid the reward being greater.” And that includes gambling. “You burned but the fires did not affect, this year, your protection band. Did you throw the money away? “We did not lose money, we gambled.”
And the bet is that it is impossible to cover the entire territory. “Before, it was done for free by a farmer with his goats; “Now we have to send a brigade.” So it is time to choose. “If we can only cover 10% of the total, we have to know where to bet, so as not to choose what is easy but what can be the most effective.”
With a really bad year, the pressure from the population is the opposite: “I want a bigger plane, when it’s the other way around. The politician will tell the plane to take off because people need to see it. That leads us to make the problem worse. We only put the pressure on when it’s really hot, and then it’s not necessary anymore. And you end up falling into your own trap.
Picos is clear: “we are fighting against perception.” After every bad year, the pressure from the population demands “a bigger plane and the politician will tell him to take off because people need to see it.” However, the need is “quite the opposite.”
In Heroes in Hell (Only the brave2017), Josh Brolin’s fire chief leads his team of recruits to a hill overlooking the overgrown valley. “Look at it now,” he tells them, “because after your first fire, when you look at it, you’re only going to see one thing: fuel.” It’s the hill the scientists are trying to convince the administration to examine. And to do it before they have to shoot, because in the meantime, the dice are rolling all the time…
