A walk through the area where the fire was declared serves to verify the fierce fight of the extinction technicians against the advance of the flames
The advanced command post installed in the Albacete town of Cancarix is quiet shortly before twelve noon. The last members of the Military Emergency Unit (UME) who have helped in the fight against the Jumilla forest fire collect the gear before heading back to the Bétera barracks, in Valencia, while a Civil Protection detachment distributes some sandwiches among firefighting technicians standing guard under a tent. The nearest bar decided to close yesterday, perhaps knowing that the fire had been under control since morning and that activity in the area was beginning to decline sharply. “We’re leaving now,” said an environmental agent.
The vivid image of the destruction that is always associated with a forest fire appears several kilometers beyond the command post, as they leave the asphalt road, turn onto a narrow dirt road and skirt a vineyard. Here there are hundreds of vines, still green, still alive, that have miraculously been saved from dying in the fire that this weekend has managed to destroy more than 400 hectares of pine trees and scrubland in the area of La Patoja, in the municipality of Jumilla. The charred land left by the passage of the flames, completely blackening a mountain range that was also green before, is only a few meters from the crop. It is an area very popular with cyclists and hikers where the characteristic smell of pine, rosemary and thyme has now given way to a breeze of wood and burnt earth that is confused at times with the stench emanating from several nearby pig farms.
Image of the calcined mountain in Jumilla. /
A few meters further along this dirt road and stones in the Sierra de Jumilla, just on the border with Albacete, there is a small ravine dyed black that gives way to an immense mantle of trees that have come out unscathed by the action of the fire. . “Here he unloaded the plane several times,” explains a brigade member of the Defense Unit against Forest Fires (UDIF) of the Region of Murcia. “It was vital that the flames did not continue to advance at this point.” In fact, it was here that the Community’s firefighters waged a “very strong fight”, in the words of the head of Extinction, Francisco Espín. The flames that had already consumed much of a hillside, next to what is known as Pico de la Tienda, managed to jump the road that acted as a firebreak and threatened to destroy hundreds of more hectares in the direction of Jumilla. “The danger was that the fire would catch the next slope, because the flames gain strength on the slope. They were very complicated hours because the fire was changing due to the wind and the storms. The head became the flank, the flank the lead, and it was very difficult to control it. But we managed to stop it”, celebrates Espín.
It also celebrates the action of the firefighting services María Francisca Mateo, a Jumillano teacher who spends the summer with her parents, her husband and their three children in one of the houses closest to the fire, in La Celia. In this small nucleus of houses, the flames could be seen a few hundred meters away. «On Saturday morning we began to smell burning and at first we thought it was a plug or something in the house. Then we went out and saw the smoke and the flames », she recounts. But no panic, far from it. In fact, María Francisca went out “for a run” in the area “thinking that the fire was going the other way.” That’s how it was, until one of those gusts of wind that kept the entire device on edge throughout the day “relit the fire in this area and I decided to go home.” Fear? Distress? “No, because we saw many people and many media working in the area closest to us, and we also have the road a few meters away to be able to evacuate.” What this teacher does regret is “the loss of a landscape” that will take many years to completely cover itself with green again.
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