The Portbou forest fire that this weekend has kept residents and visitors in the area on edge, yesterday resisted being controlled. The strong tramontana wind blew again in the morning and prevented the firefighting services from working, which since Friday faced one of the most complicated fires so far this summer.
On Saturday around nine o’clock at night, the fire entered the stabilization phase, with the perimeter marked, with no option to increase outside that contour. But the gusts of wind that blew from early in the morning yesterday made it impossible for the aerial means to fly, without which the fire could not be considered controlled. Of course, throughout the night of Saturday and yesterday, some thirty crews worked manually with water lines cooling the area or with mechanical tools, surgically attacking any plume of smoke sighted. The endowment remained on Sunday night and early Monday morning.
The towns of Portbou, Colera and Llançà recovered a certain tranquility yesterday with the reopening of the N-260 road only for residents and the recovery of rail traffic after Adif technicians gave the go-ahead to the installation, not affected by the high temperatures. Only the old road between Portbou and Colera, used by the vehicles of Firefighters and Agents Rurals to move around the area and continue working, remained closed to traffic.
The command helicopter was only able to make a reconnaissance flight of the burned area. “We continue with complicated weather, the wind stopped at night but now we have gusts from 60 to 100 kilometers per hour,” explained the deputy inspector of the Girona Emergency Region Fire Brigade, Miquel Valencia. The sub-inspector, in charge of the intervention yesterday, explained that during the day they had two revivals of fire on the left flank that they managed to control without difficulty.
The weather situation, he added, “forces us to be very attentive to gusts of wind because the vegetation is very dry, and wind and dry fuel are a bad combination.” The objective of the intervention was to control the revivals and prevent the advance on the right flank, in the direction of an area of ??2,700 hectares and with a potential affectation to several urbanizations. The works were located in an area of ??difficult access between Portbou and Colera.
For their part, the Rural Agents maintained level 3 of the Alfa plan (determines an extreme risk of forest fire) in 58 municipalities in eight counties and restricted access to six protected natural spaces. The spaces with restricted access are Cap de Creus and L’Albera and Montgrí in the province of Girona and Tivissa-Vandellòs, Els Ports and Cardó-Boix in Tarragona.
The fire, which broke out at around 4:39 p.m. on Friday on a forest track between Portbou and the town’s reservoir, at the height of Mas del Molí, has destroyed 573 hectares (550 forest area, 16 agricultural and 6 urban). The majority, 387, belong to the municipality of Colera.
On the causes of the origin of the fire, the chief inspector of the Rural Agents, Josep Antoni Mur, already explained on Friday afternoon that they managed to locate the exact point where it started and began to investigate to try to determine the cause. “We can point out with certainty that it has not been due to natural or electrical causes. From here any cause that may be related to human activity is open; It is an area where there is a circulation of people, but we cannot specify more,” he said.
