Europe Rethinks Its Approach to Forest Fires

[marmar]

Europe Rethinks Its Approach to Forest Fires
It has been a bad summer for wildfires in Europe, and all signs point to more bad summers to come. Many countries are trying out new approaches to lower the fire danger, but not all of them are high-tech. Catalonia, for example, is turning to livestock.

By Jan Petter
09.09.2021, 10.30 Uhr




(Der Spiegel) When fire is approaching through the forest, says Juliane Baumann, you hear it long before you can see it. The flames crackle through the underbrush. The fire's power rips the leaves from the trees and sends them floating through the air. And if you do ultimately find yourself within sight of the flames, rising in a wall several meters high, you won’t have much time to escape.

Baumann, 43, knows what she is talking about. For the last five years, she has been working as a firefighter in Catalonia, likely the only German on the force. During that time, she estimates, she has seen around 20 forest fires per year. Some of them have been small, requiring the attention of just a couple of fire engines. Others, though, have been much larger, with hundreds of firefighters battling the flames around the clock as helicopters circle overhead and yellow firefighting planes swoop by.

This has been a historic year when it comes to the number and size of fires in Europe. In Italy, firefighters had been called out 44,442 times by August 7, mostly in Sicily, Apulia and Calabria. In Greece, hundreds of people had to be evacuated by ship to escape fires on islands, while flames have also approached to within just a few kilometers of Athens. More than 116,000 hectares have been scorched across the country and at least three people have been killed. Blazes have also torn through Turkey and the Balkans.

"We have seen that the forest fires in Europe are growing worse and worse,” Janez Lenarčič, the European commissioner responsible for humanitarian aid and crisis management, recently told DER SPIEGEL.

....(snip)....

For one such area, though, a rather different kind of strategy is being explored: sheep. The animals are perhaps the most unexpected tool in the battle against fire, but they have the advantage of being a cost-efficient way of controlling proliferating undergrowth. Indeed, they might even produce a profit. As in earlier times, the animals are to be driven through the forest instead of just spending their time in grassy meadows. ...........(more)

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/helicopters-planes-and-sheep-europe-rethinks-its-approach-to-forest-fires-a-8c44b806-d057-4abc-9e70-57f413a30561

[Omnipresent]

1. Well, it took them a couple millennials...

Come on Euruopean’s!
We’re counting on you to give us all of your “old world” advice.
Seriously, we need all your input, and not just on wildfires.

[Tanuki]

2. No longer raking the forest floors?

[NickB79]

3. Europe's forests used to be filled with large herbivores

Wood bison and aurochs (the ancestors of modern cattle) grazed them for millennia.

[RussBLib]

4. US repurposing some military Chinook helicopters to fight fires

It's a good thing to see some military hardware now being used for other purposes, like firefighting in California. They removed everything inside a Chinook that served in Afghanistan and put in a 10,000 gallon tank that can be filled with water or flame retardant, and then sprayed over a much-wider area than typical planes or smaller helicopters. When you add in night-vision goggles and infrared cameras, the fires can be fought at nighttime, when most firefighters are given a rest. It's great to see some innovative solutions being tried.