The plague of forest fires is entering the phase of revenge, of the paradoxical reckoning with one of its main causes, the depopulation of rural areas for the benefit of urban areas. The case of Oviedo on Friday, threatened by the flames that came from Mount Naranco to enter a peripheral neighborhood, shows a phenomenon that already occurred, with intensity, in Vigo in 2017. It is an effect of the so-called fires of the sixth generation, that if they register near the cities, they can be at their doors and even enter them.
The Principality of Asturias officially ended the crisis yesterday. The Ministry of the Presidency reported at noon that the extinction work was focused on “reviewing and monitoring” 15 sources that no longer had flames, only smoke. The rain on Saturday allowed to put an end to a wave of fires that reached alarming severity on Thursday and Friday, with up to 135 simultaneous fires, with exceptionally high temperatures and an intense south wind, with gusts of 100 kilometers per hour.
The first official estimate of burned area, of about 11,000 hectares, offered by the regional government on Saturday, could be well exceeded. The Valdés City Council, whose capital is Luarca and which was the most affected by the fire, estimates that between 12,000 and 14,000 hectares burned in its territory. The mayor, the socialist Óscar Pérez, has highlighted these days that the loss of equipment represents a setback of a quarter of a century.
Another mayor, the popular ElÃas Calenti, from Oviedo, on Saturday threw away his 50-year relationship with Naranco, to proclaim that the fire in the green lung of the Asturian capital was unprecedented, which is estimated to have affected a quarter of its surface. “In the 1980s there was something similar, but it wasn’t as important,†he declared.
Calenti had just visited the Fitoria neighborhood, on the slopes of Naranco, where a hundred residents were evacuated early on Friday. Burnt down at least one house. The fire was thus placed literally at the gates of a city of just over 200,000 inhabitants.
On Sunday, October 15, 2017, the work of some three hundred neighbors with cauldrons prevented the fire from reaching their homes. It did not happen in any town, but in a neighborhood of a city of 300,000 inhabitants, Vigo, with fire raging through its urban fabric. It reached downtown areas and forced the old Citroën to stop.
In 2006, Vigo and Pontevedra spent several days under a cloud of smoke and ash, while the eye drops ran out in pharmacies. Now there is this new phase that according to National Geographic Australia has also suffered.
To all the factors such as the abandonment of the rural environment, the abundance of the scrub as fuel mass and the massive plantations of species that spread the flames such as eucalyptus or pine, the effects of climate change have been added.
There are fires of a new type, virulent, unpredictable and with a great capacity for reproduction. They only leave room for what the president of Asturias, the socialist Adrián Barbón, said about focusing on saving lives. They are even more dangerous outside of the season when the fire service is at full capacity, as happened in Oviedo and Vigo.
