As recently as mid-August, the head of the provincial government in Orense in Galicia spoke about having the best preparedness in the "whole world" to handle wildfires.
Only days later, when the fires raged out of control, affected communities in Galicia and Castile and León were forced to request emergency aid from the central government in Madrid, writes El País.
In several places, there has been a lack of both personnel and equipment, while the coordination of the work has failed, according to firefighters for the newspaper.
Volunteers and guardian angel
An example is the municipality of Losacio, in Castile and León, where there were no local firefighters when a wall of flames approached the town on August 12. Thanks to volunteer locals and other improvised solutions, as well as a guardian angel in the form of a change in wind direction, they managed to save the community at the last minute.
However, the nearby Abejera was consumed by the flames.
The lack of local firefighters has been a major problem in several places during the August fires, not least in León, Zamora, and Palencia, writes El País.
Hundreds of thousands of hectares
In the aforementioned Orense, sources tell of an incident on August 15 where residents in Vilardevós watched with great concern as a mountain fire drew closer. Firefighters were on the scene, but in the middle of the night, the work was paralyzed when a shift leader who had gone off duty was not replaced. According to protocol, the subordinates could not act on their own.
We had to stand and watch all night as the flames climbed down the mountain, one of the employees tells El País.
The summer's wildfires are described as the worst in a long time in Spain. Spanish firefighters have received help from colleagues from the EU in combating the fires that have ravaged a total of over 400,000 hectares of land. The northern and western parts of the country have been the most affected.
In recent days, the situation has finally eased, and it seems that they now have decent control over the last fires.
