The researcher is critical of the forest companies: "Negligent"

During the month of July 2018, several heat records were measured and prolonged drought prevailed - which contributed to the devastating fires.

70 percent of the area that was burned down was caused by fires that had already been extinguished once or twice, according to Anders Granström, who wrote a report for MSB, the Swedish Agency for Community Protection and Preparedness, after the fires in 2018.

- It was one of the most serious factors behind the disastrous summer of 2018, that they did not manage the after-extinguishing well.

Post-extinguishing is the extinguishing work that takes place when the rescue service has finished its efforts.

Especially in prolonged drought, it can still smolder further down the ground and post-extinguishing is necessary to prevent new fires from flaring up.

There are flaws

The responsibility for post-extinguishing rests with the land owner, i.e. forest owner and forest company.

As for the forestry companies, they usually hire subcontractors to handle the work.

- Sometimes it goes very well, a few times now and then it doesn't go well.

You are not competent enough and do not understand the seriousness of it all.

According to Granström, the subcontractors are often smaller forest management companies whose main tasks are to plant and carry out manual clearing.

- Post-extinguishing is actually quite a qualified job and requires that the personnel deployed are knowledgeable about the whole thing and understand the risks.

Granström thinks that the law should be clearer in the forest companies' responsibility for post-extinguishing.

SCA: "A clear improvement"

Jonas Mårtensson is business area manager at SCA skog, one of Sweden's largest forestry companies.

He says that SCA always requires that their subcontractors have the right training.

- Here, the industry together with the authorities has produced instructions and guidelines for how to think as a landowner, he says and continues:

- It is a clear improvement.

We have not had that in the same way before, so it will also mean that the follow-up work will work much better going forward than it has done historically.