Tag Archives: Spain

Another use for a fire engine in Spain

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Fire engine plowing snow in the East of SpainWhen we wrote about a fire engine near Jaen, Spain being used for purposes other than suppressing wildland fires, we asked for other photos of engines multi-tasking. Jesús Morcillo i Julià sent us the photo above with this description:

I’m a wildland firefighter in Valencian Community, in the East of Spain.

The service where I work is “Unitat de Brigades d’Emergència de la Generalitat Valenciana” or simply UBE.

The UBE is the essencial emergency service where valencian wildland firefighters are assigned and our mission is wildland firefighting and other emergency actions, mainly in the administrative area of the Valencian Country.

As you can see, during the off-season we and our vehicles are destinated to restore normalcy after the frequent snowstorms.

I hope you like the pic. It was taken in the Penyagolosa’s Natural Park, a really beautiful spot.

That’s all. Congrats for your very interesting website.

Thanks Jesús.

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What some fire vehicles do in southern Spain in January

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Fire vehicle plowing snow near Jaen, Spain

Fire vehicle plowing snow near Jaen, Spain. Photo courtesy of  Montse Sanchez.

A new follower of @WildfireToday on Twitter, @m_sanchez_ruiz, posted the above photo Friday with this caption:

Vehículos contra incendios adaptados con palas quitanieves del dispositivo INFOCA. Esta semana han intervenido en Jaén.

Google Translate translated it like this:

Fire Vehicles fitted with snow plows INFOCA device. This week intervened in Jaén.

I’m thinking the photo was taken near Jaen in southern Spain. Wikipedia says the elevation there is 573 m (1,880 ft). A little research into “INFOCA”, again with the help of Google Translate, yielded this:

Canario Plan for Civil Protection and Emergency Management for Forest Fires

We would like to see other photos of fire vehicles being re-purposed during the off-season.

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Fighting a brush fire with flappers and a helicopter

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The video below shows something that I didn’t think was possible — fighting a brush fire with flappers. I have used them on grass and leaf litter fires, but never imagined that they could be an effective tool on a brush fire. However in this video which shows firefighters in Spain, they have the assistance of water drops from a helicopter.

It is an interesting video that features a helicopter-based wildland firefighting crew. Here is the description that is on YouTube, translated from Spanish by Google Translate:

Diary of a firefighter

A brief tour of the work of the fire fighters of BRIF (reinforcement Brigades forest fire) from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment.

MAGRAMA currently has ten BRIF service during summer campaigns, distributed all over the country, and five smaller BRIF during the winter-spring season, in the north and west of the peninsula during the winter also BRIF perform preventive tasks ranging from cleaning up tracks controlled burning. Their bases are located in areas of high fire risk or high forest wealth that must be protected. At the same time, seeking to achieve strategic locations by helicopter anywhere in the State within a reasonable time.

The video also has some footage of a fire whirl or fire tornado, however it is much smaller than some of the others we have reported on. But still, I would not want to be standing next to it.

 

Thanks go out to Juan

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Two firefighters killed in Spain

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Two firefighters have died while battling a fire in Spain’s eastern province of Alicante. Both of them passed away in an Alicante city hospital, one on Sunday and the other on Monday, after suffering injuries on the fire. Two other crew members are being treated in the hospital.

The fire in Alicante is one of six burning throughout Spain. On the Canary Island of La Gomera, hundreds of residents were forced to evacuate by boat to escape a wildfire.

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Al Qaeda magazine encourages forest fire arson in the US

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A magazine published by members of al Qaeda has called for Western Muslims to wage war within the United States, urging them to engage in lone wolf attacks, including setting forest fires. According to ABC News, a recent issue of Inspire magazine has surfaced on jihadi forums with one article titled ”It Is of Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb”, which gives detailed instructions on how to build an “ember bomb” in a forest in the United States, and suggested Montana as a choice location due to the rapid population growth in forested areas.

In America, there are more houses built in the [countryside] than in the cities. It is difficult to choose a better place [than] in the valleys of Montana.

A previous issue of the magazine contained information on how to construct remote-controlled explosives, and helpfully listed the needed parts along with instructions and photos.

ABC News has been calling around today to find a wildfire expert who can be interviewed on camera for a piece they expect to be on Wednesday’s Good Morning America. One person they called was Dick Mangan, a past President of the International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF), but ABC was not able to work out the logistics of quickly getting a camera crew to his house in Montana. The last we heard they found someone in the Sacramento area who works for CAL FIRE.

It’s odd, or maybe that is why ABC contacted Dick, because he wrote an article for the March/April 2005 issue of Wildfire, a magazine published by the IAWF, titled Terrorists in the Woods, about the potential for terrorists to set vegetation fires in wildland areas. In the article he mentioned that police and structural fire departments receive funding for the possibility of terror-related incidents, but the land management agencies receive little or nothing to plan for or prevent threats such as these.

Below is an excerpt from Dick’s 2005 article.

…The massive increases in the federal budget for protection from terrorism mostly have been sent to police and structural fire departments. But what about the threat of terrorist-caused wildland fires in our forests, community watersheds and wildland-urban interface? Who’s worried about that threat, what are they doing about it, and how much is being spent to fund the efforts to prevent it?

The history of fire as a tool of warfare is well-documented: Native Americans used fire against their enemies, both other tribes and the expanding Europeans; the Aboriginal people of Australia used fire to discourage the incursion of the British settlers onto their island. In World War II, the ]apanese launched “fire balloons” against the western United States. While largely unsuccessful, they started a few fires and killed six people in Oregon. The Palestinians in ihe latter half of the 20th century used fire to try to destroy Israel’s carefully planted pine plantations.

Now, as more and more folks are moving into the wildland-urban interface, the danger of fire as a weapon is even greater. Even under the best of circumstances – when a single ignition occurs under critical fire conditions – hundreds and thousands of citizens are threatened with entrapment, injury or death from rapidly spreading fires. Imagine if a small band of determined terrorists, with only some basic fire weather knowledge and fire behavior training decided to set multiple ignitions in some of our most vulnerable areas like heavily populated valley bottoms with limited egress/acceass and a heavy, dry fuel loading at the peak of the burning period?

There are many such areas around the world: in the foothills of Andalusia in Spain; outside of Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, and in numerous areas of the United States from Florida to the Pine Barrens of New York to the foothills surrounding Los Angeles. Even my own hometown of Missoula, Montana has areas that fit all the above criteria, and is surely at risk under the wrong combination of weather conditions and a committed terrorist with fire on the brain.

We contacted a spokesperson for the IAWF, Paula Nelson, about the reported threat of terrorist-arson, and she responded:

Wildfire threats and terrorist threats cross borders and require us all to be prepared and vigilant. Training and communicating with fellow firefighters, regardless of agency or country, is always worthwhile in improving our capabilities in both arenas. This is a cornerstone for the work IAWF does.

 

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Wildland firefighter LODDs, 2010

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At Wildfire Today we try to keep track of the line of duty deaths (LODD) of firefighters working on wildland fires. The past year, 2010, again produced a lengthy list of firefighters who passed away while doing their job. We make no claim that it is a complete or official tally. If you are aware of any that we missed, let us know. Some of the dates are approximate and may be the date of the report of the fatality. The last three incidents are gray areas, in that the victims were not all firefighters, or were not necessarily actively involved in fire suppression at the time of the incident. They were included because they were very significant incidents.

At the end of the list is a report from the U.S. Fire Administration providing their statistics on the number of LODDs for 2010.

January 11. Australia. A firefighter was killed and four others were injured when their fire truck rolled over while they were responding to a grass fire at Lake Mokoan near Benalla in northeast Victoria, Australia. (map)

April 11. Kansas.  A firefighter was overcome by smoke and died while working on a fire west of Peru.

April 24. New Brunswick, Canada. A pilot from Grand Falls, with Forest Protection Ltd., was conducting a practice flight in a water bomber when the plane crashed shortly after taking off from the airport.

June 23. Washington. The chief of the Franklin Fire District 4 in Basin City, Washington, was killed when a snow cat that had been converted to a fire apparatus rolled about 100 feet down a hill while he was working on a vegetation fire.

July 30. Russia. Wildfires in Russia killed at least 25 people including 2 firefighters, and destroyed over 1,000 homes. Some reports say three firefighters died in the fires.

July 31. Canada. An air tanker crashed while working on a fire in British Columbia. The Convair 580, operated by Conair, went down in central B.C. The two pilots were killed.

August 2. Arkansas. A firefighter was operating an Arkansas Forestry Commission 2002 International tractor trailer, and was en route to check on the status of an earlier fire. The tractor trailer load reportedly shifted causing the vehicle to cross the roadway center line, go into a ditch and then overturn.

August 11. Portugal. Civil protection officials said a female firefighter died, one fireman was badly burned and their team had to be evacuated when they found themselves surrounded by flames after a sudden change in the direction of the wind in Gondomar region. On Monday, a fireman was killed and another seriously injured when their truck fell into a burning ravine in the mountainous Sao Pedro do Sul area.

August 13. Spain. Two firefighters were been killed in wildfires. The blazes hit near the village of Fornelos de Montes in the country’s northwestern Galicia region, close to the border with Portugal, where several forest fires are still raging.

September 21. Spain. A 46-year old firefighter died while extinguishing a wildfire in Senes.

September 24. Ohio. A firefighter was killed when a pressurized tank failed and he was struck by debris.

September 24. Virginia. A firefighter collapsed and later died while working on a fire in New Church, Virginia off Route 13.

November 16. South Carolina. A firefighter was suppressing a grass fire in the median of Interstate 20 when a van rear-ended a sedan as they approached the fire scene. The sedan was pushed into two parked fire trucks causing them to crash into a firefighter, causing his death.

November 23. California. One inmate was killed and 12 were injured when their crew carrier vehicle was involved in a head-on accident. Three of the injured were in critical condition. The elderly driver of the other vehicle was also killed. As far as we know the inmate crew was not assigned to a fire at the time of the crash.

December 5. China. A massive wildfire in Tibet’s Sichuan province killed 22 people, including Chinese soldiers during a rescue operation. Of the 22 killed, 15 were soldiers, two were workers with the grassland administration, and five others were local civilians.

December 6. Israel. At least one of the 43 government employees that were killed in the Carmel Mountain fire in Israel was a police officer. The Police Chief in Haifa (Israel) died in the Line of Duty from her burn injuries after 4 days of hospitalization. She was the first ever woman police chief there, and was gravely injured in the Carmel forest fire, while driving along with the bus full of Prison Service cadets that burned and killed the cadets as well.

Below is the The U.S. Fire Administration’s report of the on-duty firefighter fatalities in 2010. Click on FullScreen to see a larger version.

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