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an environmental disaster
1995, Lanjaron, Spain
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back to the welcome and links page |
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an environmental disaster |
(back) to Suzanne's Pool Page |
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It was one of the horrendously windy days that the Alpujarras is prone to.
It was around March and Suzanne, for whom I was building my second swimming pool, was in England, having entrusted me with the house.
It had been a dry winter and no spring rains had arrived.
The ground everywhere was covered with crisp, dry vegetation.
I smelled smoke at about 10 am - I think it was a saturday, as only my partner, Leaf, and I were around.
I wondered what kind of idiot was making a fire in such a wind and went to investigate.
The wind was from the north, so I followed it round the corner into the Rio (river) Lanjaron valley.
The strength of the wind was such that it was almost impossible to walk past the rock outcropping
forming the corner between the house on the east-west slope and the north-south river valley.
Nothing but the faintest wisp of smoke was visible from the gorge mouth at least a kilometre up wind. I went back to work distractedly but the irritation of the grey air became steadily more provocative as did the force of the wind. An hour later I went to investigate again. Clinging to the rocks, wearing my engineering face visor to parry the sandblasting of grit on the wind, I looked out on a real life classical armageddon painting. Beneath an unearthly beige sky, lurid flaming, uprooted bushes and tree branches soared and tumbled, issuing from the higher reaches of the valley, beyond the next grey curtain of mountainside. They were crashing into other trees and vegetation and setting that on fire too. At the same time, lines of fire were advancing more steadily though the dry undergrowth towards me. |
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I returned to the house and connected up hoses to the pool pump and began hosing everything within 30 metres of the house,
using the water which luckily half-filled the untiled pool. It felt like futile work with such rampant destruction advancing towards us.
The front of the fire passed and encircled us without me knowing it until I saw thick smoke billowing up from below. But the wind was carrying this smoke and therefore, hopefully, this front of the fire beyond and away from us. | |||
 sculpted by fire |
It was not my efforts with the hose but the topography of the land that diverted the fire away from the house.
The rock outcropping to the east had parted the fire either side of the house.
The short-grazed grass of the neighbour's terrace above was all alight but without sufficient fuel to ignite the orchard of which it formed the floor.
The neighbourhood fire appliance crept up the valley some four hours after the first smoke warnings, without stopping to do anything....
I carried buckets of water along the track and poured them onto things that I thought might stand more of a chance of survival for it. Smoke trickled from holes in the ground where tree roots had been. | ||
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| Many chestnut trees in the path of the fire had already been gutted by a fire of previous years and had now been rekindled. Their hollow trunks formed chimneys within which the already carbonised wood glowed like embers. Fanned by the gales, the glows gnawed away at the wood without apparent flame, and little by little the trees disintegrated, some assuming grotesquely fascinating and untenable sculptural forms before they finally collapsed. |
 burning giant ! 204 kb ! |
Dusk fell. Eerie stillness replaced the wind. We walked around to investigate more of the extent of the devastation.
The saddest thing for me was seeing the greatest ancient giants of chestnut trees growing near the water supply of the acequia with their bellies still on fire.
The acequia had been turned off....
Utter despondency. I felt my wish to make a life in the area turning to ash with the trees. | ||
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A small beauty amid this devastation was to look out in the darkness at the opposite side of the Lanjaron valley and see the myriads of red and yellow stars where the fires in tinder dry olives and chestnuts continued to fan themselves with the drafts of their timber chimneys.
There have since been many wet years. Many burned olives and chestnuts have continued to live, including some of the old giants whose insides were blast furnaces, their tenuous living layer insulated by the dead wood and their thick bark, and probably getting no hotter than in the onslaught of the sun of an August afternoon. |
 earth, wind and fire | ||
| Like some of the trees, my soul has sent out new green shoots. But fire continues to plague the trees of Spain. There is amongst many an indifference to its devastation, and so long as this remains, so will the fires. | |||
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