A FIREMAN working as part of the huge cross-regional team trying to contain the inferno sweeping a mountain nature reserve has slammed the 'hypocrisy' of authorities' messages of support whilst neglecting to keep rural areas clear of tinderbox-dry scrubland which is 'asking to go up in flames'.
“When this lot burns, everything burns, and it's more by luck than judgment that we firefighters get out of it alive,” Manolo Mallol storms, completely broken from three days of beating back a wall of flames threatening the towns of Segorbe, Soneja and Altura (Castellón province) and Gàtova (Valencia province).
His video rant, which includes footage of drought-stricken and overgrown mountain landscape in the Sierra Calderona susceptible to going up at the slightest provocation – in this case, a lightning strike, and in other cases electric chainsaws, cigarette ends and even sparks from car engines – has already netted 850,000 hits, and counting.
“All this hypocrisy cracks me up – messages asking for support for people affected and urging the victims to 'stay strong',” says Mallol, filming himself walking through the countryside close to the fire-destroyed area.
“Those governments who go on about protecting the mountainsides should come here and take a stroll among these forests, these pine trees, take a look at the parts where the fire started...and when the flames take hold, they should come along and help you get out from inside them.”
He adds: “Why not get all those people who can't find jobs and live on €400 a month, and pay them €800 a month to clear up the scrubland – even if they only do it part-time?
“We need to work on prevention, because when all this burns, everything burns, and it's more by luck than judgment that we firefighters actually get out of it alive.
“And why? Because we like to talk about 'protecting the mountains', but we just leave them to turn into a [expletive] hell-hole, that's why.”
His emotional and physical exhaustion is palpable on the video footage, and evokes recent images such as the firemen tackling the devastating blaze in central Portugal shown collapsed asleep on the ground after 36 hours of non-stop life-threatening toil.
And Mallol's warnings about firefighter safety come as a stark reminder of the tragedy of 2005 in the central-Spanish province of Guadalajara, when 12 firemen were killed by the flames as they fought an inferno caused by a barbecue igniting a woodland.
Mallol is not the only front-line firefighter who has denounced conservation failure inviting forest fires: just a few months ago, forestry brigadier Isabel María Llorente pointed out that Spain spends more money on putting out wildfires than on preventing them.
The fact that Spain suffers the second-highest number of forest fires in Europe after Portugal is only partly due to climate – intense summer heat and lack of rainfall – as Sra Llorente says, the layout of the land is, in itself, a risk factor.
“Spain has more woodland than any other country in Europe apart from Sweden,” she says, “and yet we only use about 30% to 40% of the wood we grow.”
Scandinavia's 'sustainable' tree-cutting has evolved to ensure wood can be used for everything from fuelling hearths in winter to building furniture and household fixtures without causing deforestation and, although large swathes of Spain does indeed suffer from the latter, its forest areas grow very rapidly – at a rate of 2.19% per year, compared with the European average of 0.5%, meaning plenty of scope for chopping down trees as carpentry material without turning the country into a desert.
“Despite all this, we just leave our mountains neglected, and we need to be more conscious of the importance of looking after them – not just via direct fire prevention such as fire-breaks and clearance, but also by profiting from their natural resources and by offering State support to private landowners,” Sra Llorente argues.
“It's just a case of using the wood we grow so as not to accumulate a biomass that acts as a tinderbox and causes wildfires to spread out of control.”
Major works on regenerating the mountains destroyed by fires in September 2014 and September 2016 in Jávea and Dénia (northern Alicante province) has involved cutting down trees damaged beyond recovery and replacing flammable pines with species that fend off flames and regrow quickly once affected by them.
Residents in the Jávea area were given a set number of days to go up to the fire-damaged areas and collect as much cut-down wood as they wanted to fuel their home log-burners before they were cleared away.
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