The heart of the Sierra Bermeja (Málaga) burns again

• Malaga Journey through the ashes of the Sierra Bermeja fire

When a year has not yet passed since the great fire that calcined more than

of mountain in

in the province of Malaga, and in the memory of its neighbors the images of those uncontrollable flames that were in check for days are still present to firefighters and cost the life of a firefighter, Carlos Martínez, Sierra Bermeja burns again.

It is still early to know how and where exactly the fire started, they commented only a few hours after the start of the incident from the command post installed in Benahavís to coordinate some difficult extinction tasks -as happened the previous time- due to the gusts of "strong land wind" between 25 and 40 kilometers per hour.

"The wind was very strong and the flames were out of control," said the mayor of Pujerra,

with concern, in whose municipality the fire originated and one of the towns whose neighbors had to be evicted during the last month of September.

And it is that "the hectares that were not burned last year are going to burn now," he commented with regret upon seeing the mountain burn again.

The fire was declared about twenty minutes after three in the afternoon.

A turret of the forest firefighters in the area communicated to the rest that there was light in the area known as La Resinera, an area of ​​pine and scrub with "difficult land access" through which "few people walk and in which there are no lanes and there is nothing," explained the Pujerra forest firefighter,

.

The shadow of the fire last September hovered -inevitably- in the memory of the forest firefighters of the Genal Valley and all the alarms went off.

In a matter of minutes, the

service received dozens of calls warning of a fire visible from different municipalities on the Costa del Sol such as

, where some sixty people had to be evicted from the exclusive residential area of ​​Montemayor, a urbanization in which there are -above all- independent villas surrounded by exuberant vegetation.

To control the fire, 125 troops were initially activated between fire brigades, groups of forest firefighters and operations technicians;

thirteen air assets (six transport and firefighting helicopters, two Super Pumas, two Kamovs, two cargo planes on the ground and a coordination plane), in addition to six fire engines.

The Minister of the Presidency, Elias Bendodo, arrived at the command post, and the Junta de Andalucía activated level 2 of the Emergency Plan plan.

The intervention of the

(UME) has also been requested.

In mid-afternoon, two amphibious planes were added, arriving at the fire zone in record time from the Torrejón de Ardoz airport in Madrid.

They are the planes that "normally are at Malaga airport", pointed out from Infoca, but this year they were not there yet because the fire plan had not been activated for the summer.

"The complicated location and the wind make the forecasts to turn it off" were not good, "said Bendodo, who presaged a long night and fearful of an unfavorable evolution.

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