Forest Fires
IN EUROPE
Ignition.
Disastrous forest fires
An unprecedented number of fires have been burning throughout southern Europe this summer, leaving an immense amount of destruction in their wake. People have not only lost their homes but also in some cases, their loved ones.
Europe is no stranger to forest fires; according to a European Commission Report from May 2017 such fires are a ‘recurring phenomenon,’ with an average of half a million hectares burnt each year by forest fires in the EU. According to an EU study, under these conditions, the total burned area in southern Europe could more than double during the 21st century.
The intensity of fires in 2017 has caught both authorities and civilians underprepared, leading to accusations that firefighting processes in countries such as Portugal are underdeveloped. On 17 June, fires in Pedrogao, a municipality in central Portugal, resulted in the deaths of 64 people.
Many of the deaths occurred when residents tried to flee their homes and were caught in their cars by the flames. They weren’t aware being on the road was the most dangerous place to be.
According to Professor Domingos Xavier Viegas, a fire expert from the University of Coimbra, north of Lisbon, the terrifyingly intense and rapid nature of the flames means little suppression could occur to protect scared civilians.
“In 2003, 430,000 hectares were burned,” he explains, “they spread very fast and easily got out of control. Basically, the situation was we couldn’t fight the fires because they were spreading at such a fast rate with such intensity”.
“Firemen do encounter and control many fires mostly to protect people and houses. Every day we have 200 incidents, many are new fires starting and are suppressed immediately.”
The European Community relies on each other for help, with fire being recognized by the EU as a transnational issue. The European Union has had to extend aid twice to Portugal - the worst hit in terms of loss of life - and once to France and Italy, in order to combat the fire.
However, with predictions of worsening conditions, it is clear that Europe will have to change the way the public and organizations react to fire - fast. The question is, how?
According to Richard Thornton, the Chief Executive Officer for the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre in Australia, landscapes, and topography play an integral part in the understanding of regional fire. It is with the understanding of fires and their behavior, that can lead to prevention. Thornton explains that land management is the key.
“It's all about understanding the different types of fuels in the landscape: how you reduce them, what is happening with climate change and future weather conditions. Major changes to land tenure such as the “tree changers” and the way people live and work put communities living in and near forested areas at risk”, claims Thornton.
Spreading.
Australians have been conditioned to expect forest fires or bush fires. As one of the world’s forest fire hot spots, Australia has regular fire seasons all year round affecting different regions of the continent.
Richard Thornton, Chief Executive Officer for the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre in Australia, says that bushfires are not only a natural and inevitable part of living in Australia - they are seen as such by the wider Australian community.
“Seminal moments in Australian history caused Australian communities and agencies to see the bushfire problem as a social issue, as well as a physical fire problem,” he says.
Inquiries held in 2001-2003 resulted in an organized system of protocols to ensure prevention and defense against fires, which included a rigorous public education program. In Australia, the local fire services are responsible for community education and community warning, as well as various state and federal initiatives.
Globally, Australia is leading in community engagement work.
“In other countries, this hasn’t been at the forefront, if you like,” says Thornton, “but they're catching up very quickly”.
Perhaps not quickly enough for fire-stricken parts of Europe. In countries such as Portugal, the Prime Minister Antonio Costa acquiesced in June to an independent technical commission into the cause of the fires and the failure of emergency services. Issues such as lack of a centralized system and public administration have been blamed.
Could Australian education and prevention protocols - created to ensure the safety of people during bushfire season - be extended to Europe to lessen future damage?
“Australia is open to any international deployment where different countries request that”, states Stuart Ellis, CEO of the Australasian Fire Authorities Council (AFAC), who facilitates contemporary fire and emergency service knowledge and practice in Australia and New Zealand.
According to Ellis, Australian assistance to Europe is “totally dependent on Portugal, Spain or France requesting that assistance.”
Lack of a global standard when it comes to incident management systems means although firefighter exchanges happen between Australia, New Zealand, USA and Canada, such an exchange is not possible with other countries.
“International cohesion,” says Marc Costellneau, President of the Pau Costa Foundation and EU Fire Mechanism Expert “- is not a question of resources, it is a matter of decision making and information management, of being a productive and understanding emergency and planning in advance, not firefighting in itself.”
“Of course, Spain is already talking to Chile about reciprocating fire fighters. But, to ask a country like Australia means we have to be using the same incident management system so that people will know their position and can be slotted in easily.”
“The EU needs to build their fire service so that it can be part of this international network. That’s what we're trying to do. In the future, I want to see a French guy as an incident commander in Spain having an operational chief from Portugal and an aerial resource chief from the UK. That's the challenge and the goal for the future.”
Current international knowledge
Ember.
Ember.
The future is international cooperation
This summer seems to have shaken Europe up in terms of its awareness of fires. The EU Civil Protection Mechanism is a set up to coordinate disaster assistance to 28 European member states as well as six neighboring states.
“Europe has a few big projects through their Horizon 2020 program that will fund wildfire projects, that are quite large,” says Richard Thornton.
This prospect doesn’t seem to have placated everyone. On July 21st there was an accusation that ‘the EU funding for preventing forest fires and restoring forests damaged by natural disasters and fire is not sufficiently well managed.’
Members of the European Parliament urged that the parliament ‘submit specific proposals to combat fires and drought in the EU’ in order to better prepare Europe for the future spate of forest fires.
In addition, Marc Castellnou, President of the Pau Costa Foundation and a fire expert with thirty years’ experience, spoke on whether the mechanism was doing enough.
“As a mechanism, it relies on the resources of every state. Until now, the mechanism has been a good conduit to show how we cooperate, but now the mechanism will need to evolve. We need to look at how we can converge together. After this summer, and these forest fires, we can see that necessity clearly.”
“In 99% of fires, our current system is fine and everything will work, but it is the 1% of fires that will be different and behave differently, and then nothing that we do will work.
What we learned in Chile and Portugal this summer is that these extreme fires are not a strange phenomenon that happened in strange conditions, what we saw this year was a small window opening into the future that is coming”, said Castellnou.
As the northern hemisphere summer ends, the question remains as to how fire services across the globe can help each other.
Stuart Ellis, CEO of the Australasian Fire Authorities Council (AFAC), doesn’t rule out the possibility of a UN global treaty, and in fact, believes due to the effects of climate change, it needs to be considered.
“It is definitely a possibility. All the current arrangements are bilateral - that's probably where most countries are comfortable at the current time. If climate change leads to specialist resources internationally then that may well be an issue that the UN focuses significant effort on into the future”, claims Ellis.
Further, Castellnou says “The pace of firefighting evolution is the result of the emergencies we have, so if there aren’t any big emergencies then there is no push to do it. When we have emergencies, then we take steps forward, but it’s not something that is planned to be complete by some year. I think that after this summer, after so much successful cooperation there will be discussions in the fall to apply the lesson learned, to define better the role to the challenge.”
Cooperation on an international scale is the key to more effective means of dealing with these natural disasters.
“Professionals themselves individually are already cooperating globally, so when we have a fire in Canada, or Australia, or Chile, or Portugal, or France or Catalonia, it's not strange to have professionals from other parts of the world looking at this fire and providing advice. Because we know we are all facing the same problem, and we understand that if we overlap in our solutions then it will be more profitable than doing it on our own, so that's already happening and needs to be officialised, we will see that in the near future, and faster than you'd expect."
civilian footage
Biguglia, Corsica, France
The future calls for a multinational approach to fire.
