The horrific fire that blazed through 700 hectares (1,800 acres) of the nature reserve in the Sierra Calderona was officially declared extinguished at 12.30hrs on Thursday, August 19. For those of you who have ventured forth away from the coast, you will have discovered that the Valencian Community has some amazing mountainous regions with sparsely populated villages nestled in the beautiful rugged sierras.

The Valencian Regional Government allocates substantial funds in order to protect these rural areas and employs forestry brigades to do just that. With their distinctive uniforms of yellow T-shirts and brown trousers, you may have seen one of these teams out and about cleaning the flood water ditches amongst other underrated but nevertheless valuable work. Menial tasks, you may think, but these men and women are also very highly trained fire-fighters; they spend the summer on fire-watch and are on call 24 hours a day to support other emergency services. Unsung and working atrocious hours and at times in extremes of danger, to me, these are local heroes.
I spoke to the members of the forestry team that patrols in the area where I live. They had just come back from the Sierra Calderona fire and I asked them what role they played in emergency situations such as this. José Luis said "Although we are trained fire fighters, we are called in to back up the fire brigade", Verónica went on to explain that "our main work is creating new, and clearing existing, fire-breaks". Although the forestry brigades are not in the front line of fire, so to speak, they are exposed to dangers and not just from the flames. Paco told me that "We have to watch out for the water-dumping planes as the water is dropped with so much force we just have to lie face down and grab hold of something solid." As you can imagine several tons of water dropped from 200 metres at a speed of 180 kilometres per hour is rather like being exposed to a hailstorm of house bricks! The team expects to be called out to the Sierra Calderona again in the near future "to help with restoring the nature reserve to its former glory" said Jesús.
The Councillor for Land and Housing, Rafael Blasco, stated that plans for the restoration of the park are already in place. He explained that seeds would be scattered by air over 123 of the 716 hectares affected, where according to the councillor "it is known that these areas will not regenerate in a natural way". The emergency fire break that was made during the blaze between the localities of Serra and Nàquera will be brought up to standard. Furthermore, 95 hectares of burnt trees are to be cut down with the charred wood being used to create containing walls. This last measure is being taken in order to avoid land erosion in the event of torrential rain in Autumn. Regarding the wild life, with the help of the hunting associations, eight refuges are to be installed for small mammals together with 22 sources of drinking water and 10 food containers. Hunting is banned in the area for the next two seasons. Blasco underlined the fact that according to the law that was approved last June 30, there is no way that this land can be reclassified "to allow for any other type of speculation". Guess who gets to do all this work? Yes, our local heroes the forestry brigades.