The first civil guard who helped in the Almeria fire: "We risked our lives, that's why they pay us"

The GallardosOn a roundabout on the N-340 road, considered the longest in all of Spain, there is a dilapidated and burnt-out restaurant. It is in the municipality of Los Gallardos, in the province of Almeria. This Saturday, early in the morning, agents from the Civil Guard and the Environment Department of the Junta de Andalucía are analyzing the surroundings of this building, which was already abandoned before the fire hit it. They explain that this is the exact spot where the tragic fire began. And how did it start? They respond that everything points to a spark from electrical wiring, even though the restaurant in question had been closed for years.

Standing on another roundabout in Los Gallardos, there is a Civil Guard agent who politely indicates to cars that they cannot pass towards ground zero of the fire. Regarding whether he was working the day the fire started, he replies that he was practically the first to arrive at that abandoned restaurant. He saw how the fire was coming out of that spot and, "with incredible speed," it was moving up and down. "I thought my eyebrows were burning," he admits. The first thing he did was start shouting over the radio that aerial means were urgently needed to drop water.

The Environment Department agents of the Junta – the Andalusian counterparts of the Rural Agents – describe from the scene that the fire, driven by the wind, picked up unprecedented speed and made a long run that crossed the road and joined several scrub-covered hills and consumed several terraced houses. The Civil Guard agent confirms a few kilometers further on that he saw exactly that. In the distance, however, he also saw a woman asking for help. Her mother and children were trapped in one of the houses and could not cross the fire. He got into his patrol car, put the woman in the back, and "crossed the fire line." "I thought the car would burn, that we wouldn't make it. We risked our lives, that's what we're paid for," the police officer assures a day and a half later. Thanks to this maneuver, they were able to rescue them and take them all to a safe place.

"We had to arrest them"

The police work, however, was not over. The agent went up to the municipal area of Bédar and participated in the operation of knocking door to door to the neighbors who could be asked to leave. He recalls that there were cases, especially of elderly couples and foreigners, who refused to leave. "We had to arrest them and remove them from there," he recalls. This Saturday, the Civil Guard confirmed that it had arrested two people for a crime of disobedience in the framework of the evacuation of the municipality of Bédar.

This part of Andalusia is a dry landscape with very few trees but many bushes, which together with the wind caused the fire to advance very quickly. We have to imagine the epicenter of the fire as a small dry mountain range surrounded by villages, such as Los Gallardos (to the east) or Lubrín (on the opposite side, to the west, which is where the fire has advanced). In the middle of the mountain range there are scattered municipalities, such as Bédar. Housing developments are successively located without logic, leaving buildings unprotected from the fire.

The agents of the Environment of the Junta explain that, although the theory of the electrical line is the main hypothesis of the cause of the fire, it is not yet entirely clear. Especially because the restaurant had been closed for years. In fact, from the company Endesa they have indicated that the line was not their property, that it was disconnected and that, on paper, no voltage passed through it. Be that as it may, the spark started a fire that has already burned 7,000 hectares, mainly stubble and a bit of forest. Just as happens in Catalonia, the residents of the area denounce that there has been a lack of forest management, that the land was a powder keg.