In 2016, a devastating fire in Canada devastated more than 200,000 hectares. The following year, Chileans watched helplessly as fire burned 570,000 hectares in the Maule region, where the flames reached unprecedented rates of spread, burning 8,000 hectares in less than an hour. As Raúl de la Calle Santillana, general secretary of the Official College of Forest Technical Engineers, recalls, these two environmental tragedies inaugurated the era of the so-called sixth generation fires of which we now have a terrible example in Spain.

The fire that since last Wednesday affects the Sierra Bermeja, in the province of Malaga, and which

has

already

claimed the life of a firefighter and injured two others

, remains out of control due to the convergence of a series of characteristics that make its extinction extremely difficult and at times make it impossible. And, as De la Calle points out in a telephone interview, these are

megafires that release enormous amounts of energy

that are capable of modifying the meteorology of their surroundings and causing firestorms.

"In these voracious fires all the ingredients come together:

the state of the plant mass, the temperatures, the wind, the climate change scenario that aggravates the aridity and most importantly, that there is an ignition, that is to say someone or something that provokes it ", sums up this forestry engineer. As pointed out this weekend by the president of the Junta de Andalucía, Juanma Moreno, it is believed that it is an arson.

"As the colleagues who are working on the Malaga fire have explained, it is a very voracious fire with a very fast propagation speed that releases tremendous amounts of energy, which is generating an associated meteorology," says Raúl de la Calle, which considers that we are facing

one of the most serious and difficult fires to extinguish that we have suffered in our country in recent years.

This meteorology associated with the fire itself, explains de la Calle, "causes a pyrocumulus, which is like a mushroom-shaped cloud, which is generated by the great energy it releases. It heats the air upwards, forming a column through which they rise firecrackers (embers in motion) that can move. If this cloud is destabilized by the wind, this material can fall in the surroundings causing secondary sources that can trap the extinguishing teams and the inhabitants of the nearby areas, so they are extremely dangerous, "he sums up.

"In Malaga we have seen different moments in which the command post has decided to withdraw the extinguishing equipment, they could not guarantee their safety. And this is what happens with this type of fires, that we do not have the capacity to tackle them because they can generate new fires behind the backs of the people who are working on it. "

At the moment almost 8,000 hectares have been burned, although to assess the severity of a fire, the scorched surface is not always the most important element, nor is a fire that has burned a large area necessarily of the sixth generation. A great fire is considered to be one that burns more than 500 hectares. In the one that took place this summer in Navalacruz (Ávila), 12,000 hectares have been lost but it does not fall within the category of sixth generation fires, according to De la Calle. Last year, he adds, "we had a very important fire in Huelva that exceeded 10,000 hectares but the situation was different and it was not beyond the extinguishing capacity".

Yes, the one that Gran Canaria suffered in 2019 could enter into the category of sixth generation fires, the most serious of that year in our country, in which some 12,000 hectares burned: "It did not have the continued voracity that Malaga is having but As is happening now, there were problems with the weather and with the slopes and it was also out of the extinguishing capacity of the equipment at some moments. There are times when nothing can be done, except wait for it to have some weakness, that there is a favorable meteorology or that the speed of propagation slows because they are monsters, an extraordinary phenomenon, "he assures.

"In Spain we have suffered many fires, but until now we have not experienced these extreme episodes, with such a virulent behavior due to conditions caused by climate change, which are linked to a series of structural problems in the territory that drag the countryside. for decades such as the abandonment of the rural environment and the absence of management, and that they are causing this type of fires to be beginning to occur in our country, "says María Melero, from the conservation organization WWF.

Melero emphasizes that the Malaga fire is affecting an area of ​​high ecological value in which the pinsapar ecosystem stands out, although naturally "the priority now is extinction and protect the population, because although we are facing an environmental catastrophe it is also social and we are seeing the repercussions that fires have on people's lives.

"Megafires are becoming more common, each year that passes we see them in places where you did not expect them, we have seen them in Siberia, in northern Europe, throughout the Mediterranean area," says De la Calle.

The Mediterranean area, a region that according to the climate scientists of the IPCC, the group of experts on climate change linked to the UN, is one of those that will suffer the most from the effects of climate change, is beginning to be vulnerable to these sixth fires. generation, as shown by the tragedies in the coastal area of ​​Attica, in Greece, in July 2018, which caused a hundred deaths, or the fires that Portugal suffered in 2017 in the center and north of the country, which resulted in 109 deaths . As in Chile, 8,300 hectares were lost in one of the main foci in just an hour and a half.

"There is more and more biomass accumulated so we must promote forest management because

in Spain there is still no culture of risk,

the Balearic Islands and Levante are an example and the Costa del Sol has also suffered other previous fires", says De la Calle , which recalls that although in our country areas of high risk of forest fire are regulated and there are prevention plans, they are not always executed.

It also warns about the proliferation of urbanizations in high-risk areas, sometimes with a single entrance and exit.

"We know that in many areas the fire is going to come sooner or later," warns De la Calle, who assures that "now the mega-fire for next year is cooking."

For María Melero, these fires are "an opportunity for the administrations to reflect on what has been done so far in prevention policy. These types of fires are a social emergency," she says.

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