News

Interesting to see the news coverage about the portuguese forest fires. They appear here in germany just before the sports news, but still with pictures and videos, even interviews with people who lost everything. That's more than the hunger catastrophes in Mali and elswhere in the Sahel get...

They mention numbers (for example that in Pampilhosa da Serra 30.000 hectars out of 39.000 hectars in total burned down), they mention that it is really dry (the driest year since 1945), they mention that a lot of these fires are caused by people (either voluntarily or by carelessness). What they fail to mention is: most of portuguese forests is eucalyptus, planted there, not being a native tree of the region. Which grows really fast and is therefore the favourite tree for paper industry. But it also burns. Really fast. It's reproduction is based on burning down the forest.

If it isn't eucalyptus, then there is pines, also not really a native tree, but dominant before the eucalyptus, since all the oaks went to the bottom of the atlantic in form of ships. Which also burn quite good (the pines, not the oaks on the bottom of the sea, of course). This combined with a lack of forest care, ignorant politicians, underpaid fireman with not enough equipment, people who snip their burning cigarettes out of the car window while driving through dry woods etc. leads to the country burning down every year.

Of course this is a simplistic view. But it is already more complex than the "fires caused by extreme dryness" which they try to sell in the news...

And, as germany right now is blessed by papal visits and aproaching a new election, we have other things to care about than a country just next door burning down, not to speak of millions of people dying of hunger in the Sahel.

[Update] Interesting numbers: Numbers of planes equipped for putting out fires: France 11, Greece 10, Italy 16, Portugal 0 (yes, that's a zero). Instead of buying them from Canadair (which are kind of monopolists...), a portuguese minister wants europe to develop it's own. Yeah. So spent billions of euros and a couple of years to get an all european one instead of extinguishing fires with some foreign planes.

BTW: The fires have now reached the outskirts of Coimbra...

[Update 2] A Canadair Bombardier 415 Firefighting plane costs something like 35 Million Canadian Dollars... Development took three years from program start to first delivery. Make your own figures about developping a european version (involving a burocracy of european dimensions instead of just the Bombardier R&D Department).