Actuality

Why did the peri-urban hills of Vigo (2017) and the Pontevedra–Santiago motorway (2006) catch fire?

José Pérez Vilariño
Professor of Sociology (retired) at the University of Santiago de Compostela
Founding member and former vice-president of the Galician Forestry Association

The dramatic summer months were not the time to argue, let alone debate, the fires, but to lend a hand in the firefighting efforts. Now, however, it is the right time for investigation and debate, especially after a group of specialists and political officials was created to study them. To understand the scale of the forest fire problem in Galicia, it is worth remembering that its forests produce almost half of Spain's timber, a resource whose per capita consumption per year is one of the most significant indicators not only of a country's standard of living but also of its quality of life. It is enough to recall that the United States, Canada, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Germany, Austria and France are the world's largest consumers and producers of timber and have the best-managed forests.

In the summer of 2006, in two weeks, along the Atlantic motorway between Pontevedra and Vigo, more than 70,000 hectares of woodland burned (an area equivalent to 25 per cent of the hectares burnt over the previous 17 years). In 2017, in addition to major inland forest fires, on 14 and 15 October the fire scorched some 49,000 hectares of peri-urban woodland in Vigo. The gravity and novelty of these events demand a rigorous investigation, which cannot be reduced to a police and judicial inquiry into potential deviant behaviour. It is essential to analyse not only the presence of physical factors (in particular temperature, humidity levels and wind speed) but also socio-economic risk determinisms, the prevention of which depends more directly on human action.

Social disorganisation and wildfires

The particular public alarm over these two summers is linked to the fact that the wave of fires did not focus, as had been customary, on the depopulated inland areas, but instead affected the Pontevedra–Santiago axis in the first case and the Vigo metropolitan area in the second; that is, the most populous and dynamic regions of central and southern Galicia.

Until now, in some of these areas a certain number of small fires could occur, but very few fires of any significant size. The traditional woodland, in addition to timber, provided the agrarian society with a variety of benefits linked to the use of firewood, pastures, wild fruits, game, etc. The woodlands and forests – despite being outside – were integrated into the social, economic and cultural fabric of the Galician rural community, and fire was an important tool in the management of these spaces. In a very few years, Galicia abandoned its dense network of villages to concentrate around the Atlantic motorway, creating a disorganised urban space with a high degree of confusion over new uses. At the same time, the EU, obsessed with reducing the cost of its agricultural policy, encouraged the afforestation of abandoned agricultural land, but without ensuring its management. The result is a disorderly accumulation of wood and biomass without end, which transfers to the countryside the tensions of a new urban space without the necessary planning. It is a phenomenon similar to that which has dominated, and still influences, the rate of road traffic accidents on the roads.

The Galician Forestry Plan (1992), anticipating the rapid increase of a serious socioeconomic risk of forest fires, established as a preliminary measure the starting point for a new professional, regionally based model of prevention and firefighting (PFG, chapter VII.1). Replacing provincial capitals with comarcal (district) centres makes it possible to reach ignition points sooner to prevent fires from turning into conflagrations. (With this new strategy, the area burnt fell from almost two hundred thousand hectares in 1989 to fewer than eight thousand four years later). At the same time, it pointed to the urgency of designing and disseminating a new professional-based forestry culture, which would allow new urbanites to understand the demands of the forest and its forest resources (PFG, ch. V). The deficiencies in this culture have allowed strong partisan prejudices to take root, used as a political weapon; the simplistic division of trees into good (native or home-grown trees) and bad (invasive or foreign trees), which generates rigid political positions and makes it difficult to negotiate the long-term agreements required by the tree rotations, the management of forest uses, and the significant investments of companies that need to guarantee a regular supply of the renewable resources they process.

Perirurban and wooded fire

The uniqueness of the 2006 fires cannot be linked to weather conditions more extreme than those of the previous year, when it was necessary to impose water restrictions; nor to the number of fires, which was lower; nor to a lack of resources, which were more plentiful. On 20 August 2006, the Secretary of State for the Environment expressed his bewilderment at the novelty of fires that, in a single week, burnt more than seventy thousand hectares on our doorstep: “Something is happening that has us all a bit bewildered: the fact that Santiago is being set alight from all four sides, or that the AP-9 burns down in two or three days, or the Barbanza or the Morrazo…”. Once again, the surprise and bewilderment lead the Councillor to the idea of arsonists; but he clearly rejects reducing the scale of the problem to their organised action: “I don't believe in this idea of a designed, organised plot”. Instead, he links the root of the fires to a series of factors that are becoming “embedded in a great social phenomenon that Galicia has”.”⁽¹⁾. Highlighting the AP-9, Barbanza and Morrazo is tantamount to focusing the problem on a sudden and contentious process of urbanisation, which intensifies on major transport networks when maintenance is neglected. A clear socioeconomic risk structure, combined with a high physical risk (temperature, humidity level and wind speed), explains the peri-urban fires of the summer of 2006 along the AP-9 between Vilaboa/Pontevedra and Santiago.

In 2017 the physical conditions were truly extreme but, after more than three months of drought and severe water shortages, it was imperative to have taken exceptional precautionary measures and to have the firefighting organisation in top form. Twenty-five years of the Galician Forestry Plan being in force seems more than enough time to have designed and implemented a progressive plan of clearances and capitalisation of the forests, establishing collaboration agreements with civil society bodies, in particular with silviculturists' associations and the forest communities at greatest risk, whose contribution is decisive in the initial phase to prevent a fire from becoming a blaze. An elementary analysis of the origins and progression of the fire reveals a clear deficiency in preventative work, despite the relatively small number of parishes having been identified as concentrating the highest levels of risk.

Nor is it acceptable to once again present alleged arsonists as the main culprits, whose image provokes more pity than anger and exposes shortcomings in social assistance. It is important to highlight, in this regard, the clear absence of evidence for the existence of an arson plot (the official hypothesis even went so far as to equate the arsonists with terrorists). On the verge of publishing his official report on the fires of 14 and 15 October 2017, the Environmental Prosecutor is categorical: “There is no link between the four people who were arrested after the wave of fires in October (…) we have said from the outset that we have no evidence of any plots.”⁽²⁾. The Parliamentary Commission on Fires and Forestry Policy has just reached the same conclusion; for its part, the Portuguese police, after investigating thousands of fires in the neighbouring country, concluded that “there is not a single indication that criminal organisations or economic interests are behind the fires of recent years.”.

The distinctive characteristics of the 2006 and 2017 peri-urban fires are marked by three novel features, which give them greater notoriety:

• The burnt areas are not desertified inland spaces but peri-urban areas with a high population density.
• Figures for hectares burnt have returned that were unknown since 1989, and
• More forested hectares burned than scrubland.

It is also necessary to highlight the widespread social alarm and the extensive mobilisation of the civilian population in the firefighting efforts, which succeeded in stopping or diverting the fire from numerous homes and buildings. The presence of fatalities – four in 2006 and another four in 2017 – highlights serious organisational shortcomings that had seemed to have been definitively overcome. In 2006 the disaster in the peri-urban mountains of Pontevedra-Santiago occurred under a shared management of the Xunta Government by the BNG and the PSOE; and those of October 2017 in the Vigo Metropolitan Area, under autonomous management by the PP and municipal management by the PSOE.

Strange as it may seem, the incendiary plot's web – as the Environment Councillor pointed out in 2006 – shows a clear structural component, encompassing the motorway, national and secondary roads; high-voltage electricity networks, railway lines and local tracks or paths left uncleared. Having observed this in Aquitaine, for thirty years we have been pointing out that in communication networks – especially on days of heavy traffic, which amounts to a sudden increase in population – a chain of successive fires can be generated, almost simultaneously, associated with poor combustion, sparks, imprudence or carelessness, when the edges of the roads are laden with biomass. But if there are professional and well-managed surveillance and firefighting services, capable of reaching the point of ignition in about ten to fifteen minutes, they do not become fires. It is enough to mention, in this regard, the reduction in fires and blazes that has resulted from the sealing—in just a few years—of the extensive network of municipal rubbish tips, which used to burn in the open air on many hillsides on the outskirts of towns and cities. If the industrial burning of urban waste is allowing rubbish to be converted into energy, a similar use of biomass could also rid us of most forest fires, virtually eliminating large-scale ones and the majority of peri-urban fires.

Comprehensive risk and socioeconomic fire risk

From this perspective, the problem is not who started the fire but why the peri-urban forests were able to burn. It is a matter of replacing the traditional mindset, overcoming the obsession with blame and the self-serving search for culprits, with a scientific approach focused on identifying risk factors to implement effective prevention measures and efficient management. In short, after the fires, the way forward cannot continue to be the search for scapegoats year after year; the inescapable task is to analyse on the ground the presence of the specific risk factors that constitute the matrix from which fires arise and which fuels their development.

Within the framework of an interdisciplinary project co-financed by the EU⁽³⁾ We proposed a model for the analysis of the comprehensive risk of wildfires, composed of two complementary types of risk:

• A) Physical risk, defined essentially by the characteristics of the station and the soil, acts as a precondition.
• B) Socioeconomic risk, which estimates the impact of human action as a triggering element. We define it from the combined effect of five factors:

1. The existence of a sudden increase or decrease in population density, which results in disorderly occupation of peri-urban areas or the desertification of inland spaces.
2. The degree of profitability or social utility of the forest, which favours its sustainable management or its abandonment.
3. The existence of unresolved social tensions or conflicting uses.
4. The generalisation of a coherent forest culture founded on professional logic, or the presence of prejudices that increase conflicts.
5. The level of organisational effectiveness and efficiency of firefighting services and the degree of corporate integration of the forestry sector.

Using three of these factors for which we had data (population density, forest profitability and level of tension), we were able to account for eighty-three per cent of the fires detected in the Noia region (province of A Coruña) during the years 1983–1996. The model was successfully applied to a comparative analysis of Galicia and a region of Greece, achieving very similar levels of explanation, despite involving quite different situations.⁽⁴⁾. In a similar way, and assuming that on 14 and 15 October 2017 there was a physical risk unanimously considered extreme, it would be essential and highly significant to analyse the impact of these five socioeconomic factors.⁽⁵⁾.

The mountain and the forests: strategic resources of the future

As the experience of the world's most advanced and wealthy countries unanimously shows, at the dawn of the 21st century, the countryside and forests – and particularly in temperate and humid regions such as the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula – clearly emerge as a resource for the future. Its exploitation in Galicia has the growing opportunities of an expanding industrial sector and a splendid new horizon for environmental businesses and recreational services. To this end, it is essential to establish professional management guidelines that allow the different uses and yields of the forest to be harmonised, rather than looking the other way in search of arsonists and threatening with sanctions. The fixation on arsonists seems to stem from the need felt by those responsible for prevention and rapid extinguishing to find scapegoats, given the vast resources they have had exclusively at their disposal for many years.

The neglect of the forest reconstruction policy – agreed for forty years in the 1992 Forestry Plan – led the Xunta governments to focus their short-term action on an unrelenting war on fire.⁽⁶⁾ and the fruitless search for incendiaries. The disasters of 2006 and 2017 are the most visible and serious examples of the failure of this all-out war, despite year after year incorporating ever more sophisticated and expensive equipment (in particular aerial assets and, this year, a remote sensing network) and involving professionals from other specialised bodies (the Police, the Guardia Civil, the Army, volunteer groups and a special prosecutor).

Now that the threat of fire offers a certain respite and we know the parishes that entail the greatest risk, as well as the predominant type of risk in each, the most urgent measure is to end this war on fire that has already lasted too long and consumes the majority of available resources. Only once this decision has been taken will it be possible to devote a growing proportion of the funds, currently consumed in a total and endless war, to prevention, to the corporate development of small-scale foresters, and to the design of financial and fiscal incentives that make the comprehensive and sustainable management of the forest viable. Furthermore, a significant portion of the community funds designed for rural development and the environment should be dedicated to this ambitious objective, making it possible to establish a “circular economy” based on the renewable resources of the forests.

From this perspective, the evaluation of an arson campaign should begin by analysing the degree of implementation and effectiveness of the planned measures, before setting out to look for arsonists. Shouldn't, for example, a follow-up have been carried out—at least in the high-risk areas with a known history of repeated fires—on the implementation of the provisions that have been mandatory for several years, requiring the clearing of land, track edges, the immediate surroundings of houses and communication networks? After an initial trial, overly general and simplistic measures could be avoided by first specifying the priority areas and the specific responsibilities of the direct beneficiaries (owners of houses and properties, as well as the institutions and companies responsible for the edges of communication routes, riverbanks, power lines…). Secondly, we would become aware of the shortage of professionals and their need for financial support. Previous work involving an audit of the stakeholders and a process of trial and error would allow for a high degree of legitimacy and support – similar to that achieved by the PFG in 1992 – rather than resorting to a simple, hasty top-down order, applied generally, before listening to those directly involved or taking into account the various levels of risk and responsibility. The result would be to progressively achieve a much more efficient allocation of available resources, until a situation is reached of capitalised forests with a relatively low and acceptable level of risk in relation to the value of the various assets to be safeguarded.

Long-term and participation

In this regard, the statements of Fernando Pradells, president of the Valencian Forestry Platform, are of interest: “For a prevention policy to be credible, it must be a long-term commitment, and that is not what we are seeing, regardless of which government is in power (…) more money is spent on firefighting than on prevention. It should be the other way around. Good resources are of no use if the forest is not well looked after.” This misguided approach is because “the role of rural communities has been diminished”.”⁽⁷⁾ treating its actors as minors and archaic, in order to replace them with officials, contracted staff and private consultants. It is pointless to legislate without taking the foresters into account – citizens who possess significant levels of education – treating after the fact of blaming them for the disaster and even sanctioning them. All too often, political leaders and administrations confuse management with a disorderly increase in regulations and sanction tables, which stifle the initiative and investment of civil actors. Failing to take into account the input of the main stakeholders – the forest owners – remains the main shortcoming of the current forestry policy which, for this very reason, is reduced to an endless war against fire. Trying to blame the victims can only serve to restart, once again, the vicious circle of fire.⁽⁸⁾.

The preparation of the Galician Forestry Plan in 1992 took, precisely, this dual requirement as its starting point: a) a long-term time horizon (40 years) and b) the participation of all the stakeholders involved (forest managers, entrepreneurs and universities; scientific and environmental associations; parliamentarians and political parties; the general public and the media. To understand and take into account the diversity of their opinions and interests, a comprehensive socio-economic audit was carried out (PFG, IV and V: 177-299). The result of this arduous and complex task was its approval without a single vote against; this level of consensus has not been achieved by the recent Report of the Parliamentary Commission on Fires and Forest Policy. The Forestry Plan provided for a review every five years, to closely monitor its degree of implementation, in particular to evaluate the achievement of the operational goals and to adjust the programmatic objectives to new social demands. Despite having achieved, during these 26 years of its implementation, significant university teaching and research facilities, improved silviculture, doubled timber production, created a first corporate network of silviculturists and processing companies with international links, and stimulated greater public interest in and appreciation of the countryside and forests, to the point where a good number of citizens were willing to take part in work and make financial contributions⁽⁹⁾, Unfortunately, during the first quarter of a century of the Galician Forestry Plan's implementation, no Xunta government complied with the mandate to review it every five years. It is surprising that this oversight is intended to be remedied with a redaction. from scratch from another PFG. And it is even more surprising that the main actors in the forestry sector have had to publicly demand to be heard.

Finally, forest demands – like any other demand – must be viable. This means that, in addition to the mandatory public investment, both direct users and beneficiaries of the revaluation of land and the quality of the urban environment must contribute to making the management of these forests sustainable, whose contribution is crucial for ensuring the quality of water and air, as well as for land-use planning, the supply of raw materials to strategic sectors of activity and the provision of renewable energy. And just as with our own home, the quality of our woodlands – especially peri-urban ones – will be determined by what we are willing to fund, even if it means taking on a little long-term debt. What cannot be expected, let alone demanded, is that the foresters – the true guardians and gardeners of our woodlands and forests – should have to bear the entire cost of the benefits they provide for all of us and which we all claim.

 

Notes

⁽¹⁾ El Correo Gallego and Faro de Vigo, 20 August 2006.

⁽²⁾ El Correo Gallego 12.02.2018, front page and page 12.

⁽³⁾ Forest Fire Management and Fire Prevention System: FOMFIS-ENVIRONMENT, ENV4-CT96-0335.

⁽⁴⁾ PEREZ VILARIÑO, JOSÉ: “Forest Fires and the Social Reconstruction of the Forest” in REFLEXIOSOCIOLOGICAS, a Festschrift in Honour of José Castillo Castillo. CIS, Madrid, 2004: 651–678.

⁽⁵⁾ PEREZ VILARIÑO, J. and B. MOLINA MARTÍNEZ: Socio-economic study of the most conflict-ridden parishes in relation to forest fires in Galicia, LUSOC Project 2002–2003, SESFOR, Santiago de Compostela 2004.

A preliminary inspection of the path taken by the fire in the Chandebrito parish—where it burned a car that was trying to drive away with two people inside—places its origin or point of entry at Parada, on the edge of the motorway to Baiona (at kilometre post 12.5) at the foot of a high-voltage electricity pylon, in an overgrown wooded area and next to a detached house, in the late afternoon of a hot weekend. This observation is confirmed by the spontaneous account of two local residents, who helped with the firefighting and say that it is not known who gave the order to evacuate the homes without ensuring that people took a safe route. Among the risk factors observed in the fire are demographic growth with a large number of homes and other scattered buildings that betray a profuse confusion of uses on a poorly planned piece of land with a significant load of unmown biomass; all of this reveals an organisational and management deficit that intermingles spaces with considerable urban profitability with other neglected spaces and an overload of biomass due to a lack of market value. The result is a situation of anomie, in which traditional logic of action intersects with the urban, and everyone decides for themselves without paying too much attention to the potential requirements of an environment that, in turn, does little to respond to their urban or rural needs. To rigorously define the risk matrix underlying this fire, it would be necessary to complete and refine this initial information for each of the five socioeconomic risk factors, a task for which a series of indicators are available and operationalised, the presence of which is easy to measure or estimate. (Cf. PEREZ VILARIÑO, J, and B. MOLINA MARTÍNEZ, 2004). Knowing the levels of real risk (physical and socioeconomic) allows the main components of the different risk matrices to be identified, making it possible to forecast correctly and to intervene more efficiently, replacing the improvisation of measures and general sanctions that are impossible to implement equitably. And in any case, this strategy is more reasonable than searching so persistently yet fruitlessly for arsonists.

⁽⁶⁾ Fraga's first electoral success, after a campaign centred on controlling forest fires, appears to have been a major determinant of the obsession with fires and the systematic neglect of the Forestry Plan.

⁽⁷⁾ PRADELLS, Fernando: www.larazon.es/local/comunidad-valenciana/si-sigue-la-politica-de-no-politica-forestal-habra-megaincendios-de-100-000-hectares-8591FJ18228591.

⁽⁸⁾ An example of this exculpatory logic is a recent news item from the Consellería de Medio Rural. After detailing the thousands of personnel from various bodies, as well as the air, land and computer resources assigned to this war on fire, the Consellería highlights the “2,400 notifications of fines for uncleared plots” sent in recent days “to those landowners who failed to comply with the obligation to keep safety clearances clear” (El Correo Gallego, 2 August 2018); the text does not, however, mention the eventual sending of any of these notices to institutions or corporations responsible for clearing vegetation from networks and communication routes in the vicinity of which serious fires occurred. Although neither the Prosecutor, nor the Judges, nor the Parliamentary Commission have detected any evidence of organised groups of arsonists, at the Consellería and the General Directorate of Forestry Planning they continue to speak of “the deliberate actions of arsonists”.

⁽⁹⁾ In a survey of Vigo's population aged 16 to 75, one in two respondents expressed a desire to dedicate some of their free time and make an annual financial contribution (around €16) to the care of the city's peri-urban woodlands. INTERREG III-A Project. Nature Viva (NAVI), Vigo 2004–2006; Socio-Economic Bulletin Pontevedra Century XXI, Nos. 10 and 11, 2005 and 2006.

26/03/2019