Òdena Wildfire Assessment
3 August 2015
Once again there has been a major forest fire near Montserrat. Much of the land affected had already burned 30 years ago in the great forest fire of 1986, which indicates that fires in this area are recurrent phenomena.
Fire is a natural element strongly linked to Mediterranean ecosystems and therefore forest fires have always occurred and will continue in the future regardless of the measures adopted. But according to those measures, the magnitude and the scope of fires can be at stake.
On July 26th at noon, with very low humidity levels and moderate west wind, weather conditions were especially favourable to the development of a forest fire in an area of high risk due to scarce rainfall accumulated in spring and summer. In that scenario, the activity of a farmer in the municipality of Òdena led to an incident causing fire ignition. In about two hours this incident had turned into a major forest fire that overpowered the suppression capacity of the available firefighting resources. The final outcome includes almost 1300 hectares burned, over 400 people evacuated and 2 roads closed. Fortunately, the main wind direction during the most critical hours kept the fire away from residential areas and avoided human and material damages.
A good question to be considered is whether all these effects could have been avoided. Beyond the unwise behaviour that enabled ignition and the weather conditions that favoured fire expansion, forest structure and fuel load accumulation were key factors concerning fire behaviour.
During these days much has been said about the need for prevention and about the widespread inclination to only think of preventive action when it is too late. Forest management is a good example of this. We all agree in how important it is to undertake forest management in order to prevent extreme forest fires and how necessary it is to find alternative solutions to the fact that most Mediterranean forests in Catalonia do not have any economic profitability. But forest areas in Catalonia are so extensive (and still increasing) and available resources are always limited. Does that mean that there is nothing to be done? Should we resign ourselves to the next forest fire hoping that it will not be a devastating one? Of course not. There are lots of things to be done and many of them are already being implemented, even though the general perception could be different.
If, as stated above, the forest area to be managed is too large according to the available resources there is only one possible strategy to be followed: setting priorities. It seems reasonable to give maximum priority to residential areas and for this reason communities in the forestland urban interface must take pre-fire action to mitigate risk by adapting to wildfire. Clear-cutting, together with other preventive actions, are necessary to create safety zones in the community and fuel buffers at its edge. Proper management of forestlands in the surroundings would then boost protection and optimize both resources and efforts. And once people and homes are protected the accurate management of strategic areas should prevail and become a priority. Those areas, selected according to topographical, climatic and vegetation features, can be treated so that when a fire does burn through them, it is less destructive, less costly, and easier to control. Therefore, large areas of forestland and farmland become a resilient landscape and the level of risk can be lowered once those strategic areas are properly managed.
All the preventive work being carried out by the LIFE Montserrat project in the area affected by the Òdena forest fire had been developed to that effect. And it is important to note that both public institutions (Provincial Council of Barcelona and Catalan Government) and private actors (Forest Owners Association, Fundació Catalunya-La Pedrera) involved have been working in a coordinated and agreed fashion towards common objectives. The Catalan Fire Department had defined and identified strategic areas where priority management should be undertaken. And the economic boost of the LIFE project has allowed to enlarge the area in which active forest management had been carried out in previous years. Treatments including the thinning of dense stands of trees performed during the last year have been useful to reduce fire intensity and facilitate fire suppression. If a forest fire would have happened a few years later, once the branches remaining from thinning operations had been decomposed and livestock activity had been consolidated, landscape resilience and wildfire mitigation would have already been much stronger.
In that same area the LIFE Montserrat project had also performed a buffer zone along the local road BP-1101 that facilitated the movement of vehicles and suppression resources and allowed fire fighters to set an anchor point and manage the backfires that finally put the fire out.
The results show that LIFE Montserrat’s working hypothesis have been fully accomplished. The fire risk analysis was correct, forest treatments were being executed in the right places and actions conducted were the appropriate ones. Those actions have had an important contribution to facilitate fire suppression and avoid the spread of fire to Marganell and Montserrat’s Natural Park.
The Òdena Wildfire has become an unwanted empirical evidence, but the conclusions are clear: fire risk in that area was real and the LIFE Montserrat project was introducing the adequate measures to mitigate that risk and address the situation in case of fire. It is therefore necessary to continue with the same working line so that when the next forest fire comes we can be ready to handle it with the maximum guarantees.
LIFE Montserrat Project
July 31, 2015
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