UPDATE - Area Size of New York City Burnt in Spain Fires
Date: 17-Aug-06
Country: SPAIN
Author: Jason Webb
"A very large area has burnt, about 70,000 hectares," said Emilio Perez, the Galicia region's head of government, adding that many of the hundreds of fires were started on purpose.
The area burnt became a political issue when Spain's conservative Popular Party opposition accused the local and national governments, which are both Socialist, of incompetence and disorganisation in fighting the fires.
The Popular Party said it worked out from a NASA Internet page that 175,000 hectares had gone up in smoke. The European Commission said on Wednesday it estimated 88,473 hectares had been burnt in Galicia and 49,881 hectares in Portugal.
After an army-backed emergency effort including 7,000 fire fighters and planes dousing blazes with sea water, all but one fire had been extinguished by Wednesday.
But the fires damaged Galicia's tourist economy during the year's busiest month, with beach goers coated in ashes and campers evacuated from tent sites or roped into fire fighting.
Police have arrested 30 people for arson and authorities spoke of conspiracies by fire fighters seeking work and villagers exacting revenge on neighbours.
One part-time fire fighter was caught in a wood carrying a can of petrol and 14 cigarette lighters. A newspaper published a photograph of tiny parachutes carrying firecrackers dropped onto trees.
As suspicions spread, the strain told on some fire fighters.
"It's sad you put out fires and they call you a pyromaniac. It's like blaming a doctor for murder," said one, Nacho Penela, speaking to El Pais newspaper.
Summer fires are a recurring phenomenon in Spain, where an average 140,000 hectares burned every year from 1990 to 2004.
People start almost all of them. But ecologists say the main problem is poor forest management in a depopulating countryside.
Most Galician forests are small plots of pine and eucalyptus whose owners rarely bother to clear flammable undergrowth, said Felix Romero, of the World Wildlife Fund/Adena.
"Galicia has to restructure its forest sector. Today, Galicia has a forest crisis," Romero said.
The European Commission said the risk of fires in Spain and Portugal would reduce in tandem with falling temperatures later this week, adding that 2005 had been worse for forest fires than this year.
"The figures for 2006 so far are much less than the 610,000 hectares -- twice the area of Luxembourg -- burnt in 2005. But the fire season is not yet over," the Commission said.
"The forecasts for this year show a situation that is in general less critical than 2005," it said in a statement.
