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

The GallardosOn a roundabout of the N-340 road, considered the longest in all of Spain, there is a dilapidated and burnt restaurant. It is in the municipality of Los Gallardos, in the province of Almeria. This Saturday, early in the morning, agents of 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 started. And how did it start? They answer that everything points to a spark from an electrical cable, 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 is politely indicating 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 came out of that spot and, "with incredible speed," moved up and down. "I thought I was burning my eyebrows," he admits. The first thing he did was start to broadcast over the radio that aerial means were urgently needed to drop water.

The Environment 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 had been trapped in one of the houses and could not cross the fire. He got into the 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 get paid for," the policeman assures a day and a half later. Thanks to this move, 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 climbed to the municipal area of Bédar and participated in the operation of going door to door asking residents who could 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 Guardia Civil confirmed that it arrested two people for a crime of disobedience in the context 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 must imagine the epicenter of the fire as a small dry mountain range surrounded by towns, such as Los Gallardos (to the east) or Lubrín (on the opposite side, to the west, which is where the fire advanced). In the middle of the mountain range there are scattered municipalities, such as Bédar. There are successive housing developments located illogically, leaving buildings unprotected from the fire.

The agents of the Junta's Environment Department explain that, although the electrical line theory is the main hypothesis for the cause of the fire, it is not yet entirely clear. Especially since the restaurant had been closed for years. In fact, the company Endesa indicated that the line was not their property, that it had been decommissioned and that, on paper, no voltage was passing through it. Be that as it may, the spark started a fire that has already burned 7,000 hectares, mainly stubble and some forest. Just as it 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.