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Summertime, the holidays and nice weather came, but accompanied by a series of totally undesirable events during the last years. These are heatwaves, and even worse: the fires. Our forests are on fire. If you do not trust, ask in Spain, Romania, Portugal, France, Italy, Croatia and Greece, which all suffer the worst consequences of the most destructive fires. During this year, more than 600,000 hectares were burned throughout Europe and 94.7% thereof belong to the countries mentioned above.

As far as the fires in Spain concerns, already now the statistics indicate the year 2022 as the worst within this century. By July, approximately 230,000 hectares were burned there – in comparison with the total of 189,376 hectares burned by all 255 fires broken out in 2012 according to EFFIS* data for the entire 2012.

It is very complicated to answer these questions as it is necessary to take into account that we are talking about a continent with very diverse climatic conditions, orography and features, and also because the experts themselves advocate variable opinions. Therefore, we will focus mainly on Spain (the most affected, with 30 big forest fires by the end of July), and to those points where the majority coincides apparently:

• The climatic change is real: among others, the heatwaves with temperatures over 40 °C, strong winds and droughts make possible another adverse meteorological phenomenon which spread the fires and/or makes more difficult their extinction.
• In Europe, there are more and more lightnings, which constitute another meteorological phenomenon causing fires. According to Blitzortung data, in the whole Europe, there were registered more than 1.5 million lightnings or electric storms just during the last week of July.
• There are no informative and educational campaigns and projects aimed at the population. Those might reduce the number of fires caused by negligence or accidents. And obviously, also the number of those deliberate
• In many Spanish municipalities with fire risk, neither act on forests nor the basic directive on planning of civic protection are observed. There are neither emergency plans nor plans of protection against forest fires, or, if they exist, they are not implemented.
• As many experts say, we miss sustainable forest management. This should include not only the forest cleaning and fires extinction, but also the fires prevention and dealing with the rural exodus…
• And at last, another cause of fires is in the spreading of the previous fires.

To put it simply, the forest fire management consists of four phases: prevention, preparation (prediction), response and recovery. Our intervention would support the second and third phases as our electronic sirens can be duly adjusted for an efficient response to fires.

The summary of the sirens use in several points is as follows:

• The sirens purpose is to speed up the response. They warn immediately, and provide more time for evacuation, thus avoiding potential victims and damages.
• In case of appropriate layout of static sirens (Pavian, Gibon or Bono) and use of mobile sirens (Pavian Car or Screamer Car), big area can be covered, and especially, remote residential zones can be reached as well as those with difficult access.
• Modern sirens are highly reliable. They have a lot of programming modes, they may emit various sounds even for different natural disasters, thus guaranteeing the population in the neighbourhood will be aware of the unambiguously.
• The installation and maintenance costs for electronic sirens are relatively low.

As proven by the experiences in many countries, notwithstanding the most advanced technologies, the electronic siren keep playing the fundamental role as warning systems in case of natural disasters. While performing detailed survey of the terrain, we can guarantee that the sirens are the system, which the most number of the affected will be aware of. If you wish so, Telegrafia may help you to design a suitable and reliable combination of electronic sirens, and configure them in a manner preventing effectively the biggest number of victims and damages.

Please contact us in order to obtain more information.

*EFFIS: European Forest Fire Information System of the EU Copernicus Programme

The article was written by

Sara Suárez Cienfuegos

Sara is a Marketing Assistant responsible for the Spanish speaking countries. Because of her extensive experience in finance and market research, Sara is a precise, rigorous and analytical professional, who is creative, flexible and open-minded at the same time. She brings versatility, enthusiasm and Spanish know-how on board. Her hobbies include travelling, learning about new cultures, sports, hiking and reading.