Lessons from the Mediterranean fires
IT’S TEMPTING to dismiss this summer’s blazes in the Mediterranean as more of the same. But that would be a mistake. Many of the fires the ancient Greeks saw were lit by farmers who knew how to manage forests.
The Mediterranean today is hotter and drier. Many people have abandoned rural areas for the cities, leaving timber and bushes as tinder.
Scientists are more certain than ever that man-made climate change will make the Mediterranean more prone to disastrous blazes. Even if we manage to cut greenhouse gas emissions sharply, temperatures will keep rising for the next few decades. Two fires this summer hold lessons. On August 14, a car broke down on the side of a road in the Spanish province of Avila; its engine caught fire soon after. The flames sparked at the worst possible time, on the hottest day of a record-breaking heatwave that took thermometers in many parts of Spain well above 40°C. Strong winds fuelled the fire, which spread quickly over dry vegetation, burning through 22 000 hectares and making it the largest in the Castilla y Leon region in at least five decades. About 1000 people were evacuated. The government deployed almost 200 soldiers
from an army unit that specialises in emergencies, along with hundreds of firefighters. There were no firewalls to contain the blazes, so they used heavy machinery to open large trenches.
Around urban areas, expert teams lit so-called technical fires, using controlled burning of surrounding vegetation to halt the wildfire’s advance.
Things didn’t turn out as well in Algeria, where fires started to burn on August 9. Two days later, authorities issued a heatwave alert, warning of temperatures as high as 47°C and strong winds. At least 70 blazes were detected over the following week, mostly in the Kabylie region.
Northern Africa’s heat dome caught the Algerian government off-guard and poorly equipped, with no water bombers to call into use. Officials rejected help from other countries including France, Morocco and Tunisia.
The latter two also suffered severe wildfires this summer but have reported no deaths so far. Algeria’s first move was to send in the military.
Volunteer citizens then jumped to the rescue, armed with buckets and tree branches. The fires burned through about 89 000 hectares and killed at least 90 people, a quarter of whom were soldiers. “It was human error and a lack of preparation,” said Alexander Held, a senior expert at the European Forest Institute.
Authorities blamed arsonists and arrested 22 people. In a horrifying turn of events, a young man named Djamel Bensmail was lynched by a mob that accused him of lighting the fires. It later emerged that he was an artist, social activist and volunteer firefighter.
“You need to be prepared, to have the resources, the skill and the knowledge,” Held said. “But … you need to understand there comes a point where these fires are beyond the threshold of control.” The key is to not reach that point of no return, experts say, through land and forest management techniques.