The extinguishing teams managed to stabilize the Tenerife fire yesterday in 95% of its surface after six intense days of fighting an "extremely dangerous" fire due to its rapid spread and the turns in different directions, which at first did “ungovernable”, as the technical director of Emergencies of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria and who participates in Tenerife in the extinction work, Federico Grillo, points out.
The southern area of the fire was "almost dead" yesterday and work was being done on the sources that are reactivated in the municipalities of El Rosario, Tacoronte, El Sauzal and Santa Úrsula, in the northern sector, where no complications are expected in the next few hours. extinction. In this area the fire "is in the liquidation phase."
The part that is still complicated and in which intense work was done yesterday is the southwestern sector, with two fronts in the upper part of Güímar. In one of them, work is being done to prevent the fire from advancing and passing to the municipalities of Fasnia and Arico, and the other is the one in Mal Abrigo, which is a 4-kilometer front. Mal Abrigo is formed by several ravines that come together in a kind of very abrupt hole and where it is very difficult to access to attack it directly. These fronts account for 5% of the total number of fires. "We hope that in a short time it will be stabilized and pending restarts that may arise," Grillo said. During the early hours of yesterday the battle that was fought against the fire in Izaña, in the Teide National Park (La Orotava), was very intense, to free the facilities of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias from the flames. The Themis, Stella and Quixote telescopes were left a few meters from the fire after the hard work carried out by the troops.
Until yesterday the fire had devastated 13,383 hectares -almost 5,000 in La Orotova_ over a perimeter of 89 kilometers in 12 municipalities on the island. The good progress of the works suggests that the burnt surface could increase in the next few hours, but in a reduced figure.
The good forecasts in controlling the fire coincided yesterday with the visit to the area affected by the fire by the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, who promised to declare the affected area a catastrophic area. As indicated, once the fire is under control, the Council of Ministers will approve the declaration of an area seriously affected by a civil protection emergency, which will imply aid for the affected people and direct support in the reconstruction work of the affected areas.
The smoke at low levels yesterday caused the air quality to be unfavorable, especially in the municipalities of Los Realejos, La Orotava and Arafo, where the use of masks was recommended.
The director of Emergencies Federico Grillo considered yesterday that this fire has been "one of the toughest" in which he has worked and compared it to "an avalanche". “Let's imagine something like a flood, in which you have to get out of the way because it hits you. Well, this fire has been like that. Everything that was put in front of him took it away, ”he indicated. According to Grillo, this fire in another part of the world would have resulted in "many victims." In this sense, he points out the cases of Pedrögao (Portugal) in 2017, with 64 deaths; that of Mati (Greece) in 2018, with 102 victims and that of Maui (Hawaii), earlier this month, which left 114 dead. “Here, risky but very successful decisions have been made, such as the confinement of El Rosario. Never before in Europe have so many people been confined, but sometimes it is more convenient to confine than to evacuate due to the risk of people being trapped in the middle of the fire ”, he indicates.
In his opinion, the fact that there are no victims or houses affected shows the good management that has been done in a place with a complicated topography and that makes extinction work difficult. "We have worked in ravines with blocks the size of a car falling but fortunately nothing has happened," says Grillo, who highlights the "veteranity" of the firefighting teams on the islands.
