Riverside fire

The bamboo at the side of the River Segura in Blanca town has been cut down and set alight, whether this was on purpose or not i dont know, but a team of at least a dozen fireman were on hand this morning keeping control of the blaze and damping down the cliff face. the heat was fairly intense and could be felt from the other side of the river.

How fires start?

We hold our winter pool cover down all round the edge with filled 8 litre water bottles, which has worked very efficiently but as I was tidying up around the pool yesterday, and I noticed some black holes and marks on the pool winter cover. Further investigation revealed it was burns, what has happened is the sun has been magnified through the bottles of water to cause intense heat spots and has nearly set the cover on fire, if someone had told me this was possible I would not have believed them, I now wonder if this is how some of the fires start in the campo.

The cover will be coming off in a couple of weeks for the solar cover to go on, but in the meantime have painted the bottles with white emulsion to stop the suns rays causing any further damage.

Wild windy weather

Yesterday was a wild and windy day, winds were recorded at 150 Kilometres an hour. At La Nucia in the Benidorm area an electricity pylon was blown down which started a massive forest fire, this was fanned by the strong wind and by evening around 15000 people in 25 neighbourhoods had to be evacuated from their properties. The fire brigade, police and army from the Valencia and Madrid regions were still struggling to bring the fires under control at 01:00 this morning. There are three Canadair planes and a Kamov helicopter standing by to join in as soon as the wind conditions allow.
Elsewhere in the region roads were strewn with broken branches, fallen trees, tiles and TV aerials were blown from roofs. along the coast exposed to the wind, massive waves battered the sea walls. It looks like we were relatively lucky here on the Vega Baja although we did loose electricity for a small part of the day.

Firemen needed

Apparently there is a shortage of Firemen especially around the Benidorm area. Last weekend in Villajoyosa, Altea, and Benidorm there were five different fires, in a short period of time and firemen had to leave unextinquished fires to deal with the more serious ones. Thank goodness there were no lives in danger.

Galician forest fires

More than 2,000 forest fires, most deliberately lit, ravaged the North-Western province of Galicia in a two week period this summer, the worst fires in the province in 20 years, a regional government environment spokesman said Friday 1st September.
Galicia emergency service dealt with 2,055 fires during the first two weeks of August - up from 995 during the same period last year. Most of the fires were lit by arsonists. On Friday Police arrested a man suspected of having lit 94 fires since 2002, Two women died last month in a fire he allegedly lit.
Most of the fires raged between August 4-15 and scorched 77,000 hectares of land in a province which borders the Atlantic Ocean and is normally rain swept. Three new fires broke out in the region on Friday.
Police have arrested 52 people in connection with the fires this year. Four people have died in the fires.