Fighting fire means reading the landscape

“It’s still overwhelming. The number of fires is so huge that you can’t save everything,” says Bertram de Rooij. He was one of twenty Dutch firefighters who went to the Spanish region of Galicia in August. They joined a mission to help with firefighting and to gain extra knowledge and experience. So far this year, more than 400,000 hectares have burned across Spain—more than the total area of all Dutch forests combined. Galicia, and especially the province of Ourense where the team was stationed, was one of the hotspots.

“In the second week we were deployed only as firefighters. It was all hands on deck. All the training sessions were cancelled. It also felt strange to return to the Netherlands, because the scale and the number of fires in the area kept increasing.” De Rooij looks back on the mission from his office at Wageningen University & Research. Because besides working for the Dutch fire brigade, he also studies how to design landscapes in a time of climate change.

De Rooij immediately noticed that the Spanish fire brigade often works very differently from what he was used to in the Netherlands. Extinguishing with water? The Spaniards do that, but sparingly. “They have to be frugal with water and besides, other methods are often more effective.” Bulldozers, axes, and oversized rakes were standard tools. “We cleared long strips of vegetation, sometimes even cutting straight through people’s gardens. Without fuel the fire dies.”

Sometimes, using nothing more than fire flappers—an aluminium tube with a rubber pad on the end, used to beat down low flames—they defended farms. “You beat down the flames, let it rest for a moment, and then a colleague hits exactly next to it. After an hour of pounding away with four people, you’re completely exhausted from the effort and the heat. It was 44 degrees Celcius.”

“We even learned how to do backburns,” De Rooij continues. “First you clear a strip of vegetation, then you set a controlled fire against the wind. When the two fires meet, the uncontrolled one dies out.” The idea of the fire brigade deliberately setting a field or patch of forest alight has not yet become common in the Netherlands. According to De Rooij, it requires a different mindset. “Where we would rush in much faster, they keep their distance. The most important thing is: stop and think. You can wait for a fire at a strategic spot and then put it out in a targeted way.”

To understand how the Spanish firefighters worked, De Rooij studied how the fire behaved in the landscape—just like the local wildfire brigade, which also manages nature in the area during winter “They read the landscape and how the fire moves. Certain trees are common because they are commercially interesting, like eucalyptus. But those burn extremely well and even contain oil. The fire brigade would actually prefer to get rid of them, but that’s difficult. You could also see where the landscape was a bit wetter There, the fire would stop or at least slow down. The landscape can help you—or work against you.”

“Something will always burn. That’s not necessarily a problem, but you want to keep it manageable. For example, it matters how the transition between nature and village or farm is designed. I often saw shrubs growing right up to the farmyard. If you had a buffer zone without vegetation there, you’d have a better chance of protecting people and buildings. But that’s hard to arrange in a region with so many different landowners and city dwellers who inherited a plot of land. In Canada and the US, fire prevention around homes is already very common, but not yet in Europe. In a village like Doorwerth on the Veluwe, the apartment blocks stand right in the middle of the forest—or think of all the campsites in that same area. I hope nothing ever goes wrong there.”

Just as in flood-prone areas, De Rooij believes it makes sense to look carefully at land-use design in fire-prone areas. “In the Netherlands we could do much more with this, especially with climate change in mind. We should try to tackle multiple challenges at once.” This is where his firefighting work overlaps with his research. “I want to see how we can design landscapes with more compartments and make smarter choices. You could use a sandy path as a buffer, but what if a buffer zone also helps to retain water? That’s far better. Then you’re not only working on fire prevention, but also on combating drought and supporting ecological development.”

De Rooij is certainly taking up these research questions—not only in the Netherlands but also within various European projects on spatial adaptation. For now, though, his mind is still with the crisis in Galicia. The Spanish colleagues, helped by a team from Estonia, are still doing everything they can to fight the fires. De Rooij: “Fortunately it’s getting better now. The fires are coming under control, but in future summers it could just as easily flare up again. So it’s time to look ahead.”