David Borrell: "It is a problem how we have the houses within the forests"

BarcelonaInspector David Borrell, head of the Generalitat Firefighters, comments as soon as he picks up the phone that they have just declared a fire in Gavà and that he will be able to talk as long as it doesn't get complicated. It is his routine of the last few days, leading a Firefighter corps that has been facing simultaneous daily fires for a week. The afternoon, again, was very complicated.

Has he been able to sleep?

— In pieces. Today yes, today I was able to rest a little better because we already had a better situation.

What has been the most complicated moment?

— The most critical moment was when we had the fire in Sentmenat and Carme. It was a moment of real simultaneity, of potential large fires.

You always say that simultaneity is one of the worst scenarios. Has it been difficult for you to have staff everywhere?

— The approach taken until recently was more reactive. That is to say, if you have a major emergency, you send the resources it needs. Do you have a second emergency? You end up emptying everything you have. And if you have a third emergency? You collapse. In 2022, we changed our vision and try to get ahead. We analyze the behavior of the fire to know what it will do, when it will impact the population... And from here, we don't give a classic response, but rather we can implement a containment strategy, not an attack strategy. Obviously, always protecting the population, which is our first priority, but we can admit that the forest will burn and we will wait for the fire at a certain point. Or even that it may impact, with people protected, some population, and there we will contain it. We cannot leave the country unprotected.

In other words, lesser evils must be accepted to avoid an operational collapse.

— So far we have been able to respond by prioritizing certain flanks of the fires and in some cases accepting impacts. In the case of Carme (Anoia), the impact on an industry. In the case of Sentmenat (Vallès Occidental), accepting that some building has also burned down. What you are avoiding is putting more population at risk, more buildings at risk. In the case of Carme, a waste disposal site has burned. We have accepted it. These are tough decisions, but they respond to this intelligence and this guarantee of anticipating. We are among the most powerful Firefighter corps in Europe. 

These days one of the problems have been the scattered urbanizations in the forest, some of which could not be saved.

— You can ask a fire department to be well-sized and we are sizing ourselves better and better. But that alone is not enough. Sometimes people say we need to hire more firefighters, but notyou can have infinite firefighters. As a country, what we are not fixing is: does everyone have a protection strip around them? Because if you are integrated in the middle of the mountain, in the middle of a Mediterranean forest, then it is inevitably unrecoverable. More than saving lives, which is what we try to do, I don't know if we can be asked to do much more.

Where do solutions pass?

— Here the problem is no longer so much about the operational capacity of the Firefighters, which might have been the case 10 or 15 years ago, the problem is how we have our forests and how we have especially our buildings in relation to these forests. Above all, if you have a dwelling without a perimeter strip, it is very difficult for it to be defended.

Many lockdowns are also being seen.

— Above all, we recommend that people follow the instructions of the Fire Department. And normally, we use confinement more. Why? Firstly, if you are in a safe space, if you have a consolidated, compact development, it can resist the impact of the fire. Therefore, confined you are very safe. When these conditions are not met, another of the measures we often take is to relocate the neighbors in the first row of houses and put them in a safe place. We do not rule out evacuation, we consider it, but to evacuate you also need a window of opportunity that does not always exist. It is important that people understand that the worst idea is self-evacuation.It is the worst thing that can be done.

What lessons are these fires leaving you?

— We are always with continuous improvement. We can tell you that we are very satisfied with this command system that allows us to face situations of great simultaneity. This fills us with pride, without ceasing to draw the lessons that we will internally draw.