The plague of forest fires is entering the phase of revenge, of paradoxical revenge against one of its main causes, the depopulation of the rural environment for the benefit of the urban. The case of Oviedo on Friday, threatened by the flames that came from the Naranco mountain 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 sixth generation fires, which if registered near cities, can approach the gates and even enter them.
Asturias officially ended the crisis yesterday. The Ministry of the Presidency reported at noon that the extinguishing tasks were focused on “checking and monitoring” 15 foci that no longer had flames, only smoke. Saturday’s rain put an end to a wave of fires that reached an alarming severity on Thursday and Friday, with up to 135 simultaneous fires, with exceptionally high temperatures and an intense wind from the south, with gusts of 100 kilometers per hour.
The first official estimate of burned surface, of around 11,000 hectares, which the regional government offered on Saturday, could be significantly exceeded. The City Council of Valdés, 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 quarter of a century back.
Another mayor, the popular ElÃas Calenti, from Oviedo, used his 50 years of association with the 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 the surface “In 1980, something similar happened, but it wasn’t as important,” he declared.
Calenti had just visited the neighborhood of Fitoria, at the foot of the Naranco, where a hundred residents were evacuated on Friday morning. He burned at least one house. The fire was placed literally at the gates of a city of just over 200,000 inhabitants.
It did not happen in any town, but in a neighborhood of a city of 300,000 inhabitants, Vigo, with the fire spreading through the urban area. It reached central 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 which, according to National Geographic, Australia has also experienced.
To all the factors, such as the abandonment of the rural environment, the abundance of hedgerows as fuel mass and the massive plantings of flame-spreading species such as eucalyptus or pine, have been added effects of change climatic
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 out of season when the extinguishing service is at full capacity, as happened in Oviedo and Vigo.
