The Los Gallardos fire, in Almería, is already the deadliest of the century in Spain: a dozen dead, some 6,600 hectares and 1,405 evacuated. Many of the victims were found inside their cars, trapped on a dead-end road. And while the Civil Guard works to identify everyone and the INFOCA teams work to completely put out the fire, the public debate becomes increasingly intense.
There will be many topics to analyze, but there is one in particular whose importance will be capital: the one that started it all, the cable that could have turned it all on.
The cable theory. Almost from the first moment, the theory that a broken electricity cable could be the cause of the tragedy spread like wildfire. At dawn on Friday, Endesa sent a technical team and concluded that the cable was not its own. RedEléctrica was quick to add that it was not part of its transportation network either.
As they explained, it would be a private low-voltage connection that served an abandoned restaurant (Anita bar) decommissioned since 2009. According to the technicians, in fact, the cable should not have voltage.
And, of course, without tension there are no sparks. The judicial experts have already made this clear: if there is no electrical charge circulating through the copper, it is physically impossible for the fires to originate there as described. This has opened the debate: was it really “without tension” as it appears in Endesa’s files or was it being used (“underhand”) to supply scattered farmhouses?
We still don’t know, but (beyond the specific case of Los Gallardos) the interesting thing is the question it raises: how many cables like these are loose in Spain?
What exactly happens with the cables? The first thing is to realize that we are facing a serious problem. And not exactly because the fraction of fires caused by cables are many, but because they tend to be very destructive. In California, for example, cables are behind about half of the most destructive fires in its history despite causing less than 10% of the ignitions.
In Spain we do not have clear statistics, but some studies say that the figures are around the same percentages: in Aragon the power lines caused around 10% of accidental fires this year, and WWF reports already place them among the causes of large fires.
And no one does anything? Well, after the Guadalajara fires of 2005, the State forced the network owners to keep the margins of their lines clear and review them from time to time. However, the case of Los Gallardos highlights something about which we have reflected little: there are many lines that, on a practical level, belong to no one.
That is the big problem: An old connection to a ruin, without maintenance and perhaps with informal current, can be a huge source of problems.
And now what? Once responsibilities are resolved, there will be more pressure to monitor private power lines in forest areas (something that is frequently debated in California). But the solutions are always the same: financing prevention is boring and, for this reason, we are spending 400 million a year in Spain when it would take ten or fifteen times more.
Image | Dina Lydia
In | The fire in Los Gallardos (Almería) reminds us of the car trap: it is not a shelter, it is a lethal oven
